THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


RECORDS    OF   CIVILIZATION 

SOURCES   AND    STUDIES 

EDITED    UNDER   THE    AUSPICES    OF   THE 

DEPARTMENT  OF  HISTORY,  COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY 


GENERAL  EDITOR 

Austin  P.  Evans,  Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR   OF   HISTORY 


ASSOCIATE    EDITORS 


Frederick  Barry,  Ph.D. 

ASSOCIATE  professor  OF  THE  HIS- 
TORY OF  SCIENCE 


John  Dickinson,  Ph.D. 
professor     of     constitutional 
law,     university    of    pennsyl- 
vania;  assistant   secretary   of 
commerce 


ADVISORY    BOARD 


DmO  BiGONGIARI 

DA  PONTE  PROFESSOR  OF  ITALIAN 

Carlton  J.  H.  Hayes,  Litt.D. 

PROFESSOR  OF  HISTORY 

A.  V.  Williams  Jackson,  LL.D. 

PROFESSOR    OF    INDO-IRANIAN    LAN- 
GUAGES 

F.  J.  Foakes  Jackson,  D.D. 
charles  a.  briggs  graduate  pro- 
fessor of  christian  institutions 
in  union  theological  seminary 

Charles  Knapp,  Litt.D. 
professor  of  greek  and  latin 

Robert  Morrison  MacIver,  Litt.D. 
lieber  professor  of  political 
philosophy  and  sociology  in 
barnard  college ;  executive 
officer,   department   of   soclvl 

SCIENCE 


Howard  Lee  McBain,  LL.D. 

RUGGLES  professor  OF  CONSTITU- 
tional law  and  dean  of  the 
graduate  faculties 

David  Muzzey,  Ph.D. 
professor  of  history 

James  T.  Shotwell,  LL.D. 

professor  of  history;  director 
of  the  division  of  economics 
and  history,  carnegie  endow- 
ment  for   international  peace 

Lynn  Thorndike,  Ph.D. 
professor  of  history 

William  L.  Westermann,  Ph.D. 
professor  of  ancient  history 

Frederick  J.  E.  Woodbridge,  LL.D. 

JOHNSONIAN  PROFESSOR  OF  PHI- 
LOSOPHY 


NUMBER    IV 


AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 


RODUCTION  TO  THE  H 


~\AAM>py 


AN   INTRODUCTION 

TO   THE 

HISTORY    OF    HISTORY 


BY 


JAMES    T.    SHOTWELL 

PROFESSOR    OF    HISTORY    IN 
COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY 


NEW   YORK:    MORNINGSIDE    HEIGHTS 

COLUMBIA     UNIVERSITY     PRESS 

1936 


$13 

Copyright  1922     *::i 
COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  TRESS 


First  printing,  April,  1922 

Second  printing,  September,  1922 

Third  printing,  February,  1936 


PRINTED   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES   OF   AMERICA 
THE   PLIMPTON   PRESS,   NORWOOD,    MASS. 


Zo 


PREFACE 

The  series  of  which  this  volume  forms  part  was  planned  before 
the  war.  Its  purpose  was  twofold  :  in  the  first  place,  to  make  ac- 
cessible in  English  those  sources  of  the  history  of  Europe  which  are 
of  prime  importance  for  understanding  the  development  of  western 
civilization ;  in  the  second  place,  to  indicate  some  of  the  more  sig- 
nificant results  of  scholarship  in  the  field  covered.  It  was  intended 
to  supply,  to  those  who  could  not  read  the  documents  in  the  origi- 
nal, the  means  for  forming  some  idea  of  the  problems  of  the  his- 
torian. About  twenty  volumes  had  been  arranged  for,  covering  a 
considerable  diversity  of  topics,  but  bearing  in  one  way  or  another 
upon  the  main  purpose  of  the  series,  when  with  the  entry  of  the 
TTnited  States  into  the  war  the  Editor  was  called  into  Government 
service  which  lasted  through  the  Peace  Conference.  Work  upon 
the  series  was  therefore  interrupted,  with  the  result  that  only  three 
volumes  have  been  published  as  yet:  a  general,  comprehensive 
source-book  for  Greek  social  history,  Hellenic  Civilization  by 
Professors  Botsford  and  Sihler;  and  two  volumes  of  a  different 
type,  each  dealing  with  but  a  single  source,  —  Gregory  of  Tours' 
History  of  the  Franks  by  Dr.  Brehaut,  and  The  Book  of  the  Popes 
(Liber  Pontificalis)  by  Dr.  Loomis. 

With  the  close  of  the  war,  plans  for  continuing  the  series  were 
again  taken  up,  but  with  modifications  imposed  by  changed  condi- 
tions. Without  entering  into  details  as  to  the  way  those  condi- 
tions have  affected  contributors  and  pubhshers,  it  may  be  said  that 
in  general  it  has  been  necessary  to  lessen  the  purely  documentary 
matter  in  the  series  wherever  it  was  otherwise  readily  accessible, 
and  to  enlarge  the  scope  of  the  ''studies"  which  had  been  a  some- 
what secondary  element  in  the  original  plan.  This  modification, 
however,  did  not  affect  the  essential  purpose  of  the  series;  for  it 
had  never  been  the  object  to  present  merely  revised  translations  of 
texts  already  easily  available  in  English,  valuable  as  that  service 
might  be.  Its  aim  had  been  rather  to  fill  certain  gaps  in  the  equip- 
ment of  the  average  American  student  of  history,  and  those  gaps 


viii  PREFACE 

exist  as  frequently  in  the  field  of  critical  interpretation  as  in  the 
knowledge  of  the  texts  themselves.  Even  where  the  text  is  already 
at  hand,  therefore,  the  student's  problem  is  not  necessarily  solved ; 
for  modern  scholarship  may  have  suggested  new  and  unsuspected 
meanings.  In  such  instances  the  new  editorial  plan  is  to  shorten 
the  text  to  mere  illustrative  extracts  and  to  concentrate  upon  de- 
scriptive or  critical  comment.  In  this  way  it  is  hoped  to  reduce  the 
bulk  of  the  volumes,  while  opening  up  in  a  freer  way  than  formerly 
the  significance  of  the  sources  with  which  they  deal.  In  other  in- 
stances, however,  where  the  text  itself  is  the  chief  contribution, 
the  original  method  of  publication  will  be  maintained  as  far  as  pos- 
sible. This  involves  a  certain  inconsistency  in  the  treatment  of 
text  and  comment,  since,  in  volumes  like  the  present  one,  the  elim- 
ination of  a  purely  textual  section  has  thrown  many  illustrative 
extracts  into  an  introduction  —  now  become  the  body  of  the  book 
Even  this  lessened  plan,  however,  could  not  have  been  realized  but 
for  the  generous  support  of  the  Trustees  of  Columbia  University. 


The  present  volume  needs  an  especial  word  of  explanation  and 
apology.  It  has  grown  out  of  an  introduction  to  a  proposed  col- 
lection of  texts  from  mediaeval  and  modern  historians.  Nothing 
could  have  been  farther  from  the  original  intention  of  the  authoi 
than  to  write  a  history  of  antique  historiography,  which  the  book 
now  in  part  resembles.  But  the  absence  of  any  satisfactory  general 
survey  covering  the  antique  field  led  to  enlargement  in  scope  and 
critical  comment,  until  the  work  assumed  the  present  form.  It  is 
freely  recognized  that  the  field  covered  belongs  of  right  to  the  an- 
cient historian,  properly  equipped  not  only  with  the  classics  and  the 
languages  of  Western  Asia  but  also  with  archaeology  and  its  asso- 
ciated sciences.  If  any  such  had  done  the  work,  this  volume 
would  have  remained  the  single  chapter  originally  planned ;  so  the 
classicist,  who  will  undoubtedly  detect  in  it  the  intrusion  of  an  out- 
sider, is  at  least  partly  to  blame  for  the  adventure,  since  it  was  the 
absence  of  a  guide  such  as  he  might  have  offered  which  led  to  the 
preparation  of  this  one. 

However  much  of  an  adventure  this  is  in  itself,  the  circum- 
stances under  which  the  volume  was  made  ready  for  the  press  have 


PREFACE  ix 

made  it  all  the  more  perilous  from  the  standpoint  of  scholarship. 
For  it  has  been  prepared  at  odd  moments,  as  occasion  offered,  in 
the  midst  of  other  work  of  an  entirely  different  kind  and  involving 
heavy  responsibilities.  Part  of  it  has  been  written  during  Euro- 
pean travel  with  only  such  books  at  hand  as  could  be  obtained  in 
local  libraries  or  could  be  carried  along ;  part  of  it  is  drawn  from 
fragments  of  old  university  lectures;  and  part  was  already  pre- 
pared for  a  mere  introduction  to  source  selections.  This  will  ex- 
plain, if  it  does  not  excuse,  some  irregularities  in  treatment,  and 
inadequacies  in  the  bibliographical  notes,  as  well  as  the  use  in  most 
instances  of  available  translations  of  extracts.  Had  there  been  any 
possibility  of  a  separate  and  lengthy  series  of  illustrative  transla- 
tions, as  was  originally  planned,  these  extracts  would  not  have  ap- 
peared in  the  Introduction.  Generally,  however,  a  little  examina- 
tion will  reveal  something  like  a  substitute  for  the  bibliographies  in 
the  footnotes,  or  in  a  reference  to  some  comprehensive  manual  which 
is  the  inevitable  starting  point  for  further  work  in  any  case.  If, 
however,  this  Introduction  to  the  exacting  disciplines  of  history 
has  itself  escaped  some  of  the  many  pitfalls  which  lie  along  the 
pathway  it  follows,  its  good  fortune  is  due  in  the  first  instance  to 
the  fact  that  the  pathway  is,  upon  the  whole,  not  an  obscure  one, 
but  travelled  by  many,  who,  however,  go  only  part  way  or  turn  off 
in  different  directions.  But  in  the  second  place,  it  is  due  to  the 
critical  care  and  scholarly  oversight  which  has  been  given  the  en- 
tire apparatus  of  the  book  by  Miss  Isabel  McKenzie,  formerly  of 
the  History  Department  of  Barnard  College. 

J.  T.  S. 

Columbia  Untversity, 
April,  1 92 1. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface .        »        .     vii 

SECTION  I 
INTRODUCTION 

CHAPTER 

I.  Definition  and  Scope  of  History i 

II.  Prehistory  ;    Myth  and  Legend 12 

III.  Books  and  Writing 28 

IV.  The  Measuring  of  Time 40 

V.  Egyptian  Annals 51 

VI.    Babylonian,  Assyrian  and  Persian  Records     ...      66 

SECTION  II 
JEWISH  HISTORY 

VII.    The  Old  Testament  as  History 79 

VIII.    The  Pentateuch 86 

IX.    The  Remaining  Historical  Books  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment     96 

X.    The  Formation  of  the  Canon 108 

XI.    Non-Biblical  Literature;    Josephus  .        .        .        .114 

SECTION  III 
GREEK  HISTORY 

XII.  From  Homer  to  Herodotus 128 

XIII.  Herodotus i44 

XIV.  Thucydides 162 

XV.  Rhetoric  and  Scholarship i79 

XVI.    PoLYBius 191 

XVII.    Later  Greek  Historians 202 

zi 


xu 


CONTENTS 


SECTION  IV 
ROMAN  HISTORY 

XVIII.    History  at  Rome;    Oratory  and  Poetry  .       .        .        .211 
XIX.    Roman  Annalists  and  Early  Historians  ....     225 

XX.      VaRRO,   CiESAR  AND    SaLLUST 236 

XXI.    LiVY 247 

XXII.    Tacitus 257 

XXIII.    From  Suetonius  to  Ammianus  Marcellinus      .        .        .273 


SECTION  V 
CHRISTIANITY  AND   HISTORY 


^  XXIV.    The  New  Era 

^'  XXV.    Allegory  and  the  Contribution  of  Origen 
^--XXVI.    Chronology  and  Church  History;    Eusebius 


278 
289 
300 


POSTSCRIPT  ON 
MEDLEVAL  and   MODERN  HISTORY 

XXVII.    The  Interpretation  of  History 


Index 


314 
335 


THE   PALERMO  STONE 

(See  page  55) 


SECTION   I 
INTRODUCTION 

CHAPTER  I 
DEFINITION  AND   SCOPE  OF  HISTORY 

Until  recently,  history  itself  has  lacked  historians.  There  have 
been  histories  of  almost  everything  else  under  the  sun,  of  literature, 
philosophy,  the  arts  and  sciences,  and,  above  all,  of  politics.  But 
until  the  last  few  years,  —  with  the  exception  of  a  few  works  for 
students,  —  the  story  of  history  has  remained  unwritten.  Clio, 
though  the  oldest  of  the  Muses,  has  been  busy  recording  the  past  of 
others  but  has  neglected  her  own ;  and  apparently  her  readers 
have  seldom  inquired  of  her  about  it.  For  even  yet  the  phrase 
"history  of  History"  conveys  but  little  meaning  to  most  people's 
minds,  seeming  to  suggest  some  superfluous  academic  problem  for 
which  a  busy  world  should  afford  no  time,  rather  than  what  it  really 
is,  that  part  of  the  human  story  which  one  should  master  first  if 
one  would  ever  learn  to  judge  the  value  of  the  rest. 

The  prime  reason  for  this  state  of  afifairs  is  probably  that  which 
has  just  been  hinted  at.  Clio  was  a  Muse ;  history  has  generally 
been  regarded  as  a  branch  of  literature.  Historians  have  been 
treated  as  masters  of  style  or  of  the  creative  imagination,  to  be 
ranked  alongside  poets  or  dramatists,  rather  than  simply  as  his- 
torians, with  an  art  and  science  of  their  own.  Thucydides  has  been 
read  for  his  Greek,  Livy  for  his  Latin.  Carlyle  ranks  in  book-lists 
with  the  word-painter  Ruskin.  Now  and  again  historical  criticisms 
of  the  "great  masters"  have  appeared,  and  scholarly  studies  of 
limited  fields.  But  so  long  as  history  could  be  viewed  as  primarily 
a  part  of  literature  its  own  history  could  not  be  written ;  for  the 
recovery  of  the  past  is  a  science  as  well  as  an  art. 

The  history  of  History,  therefore,  had  to  await  the  rise  of  scien- 
tific historical  criticism  before  it  attracted  the  attention  of  even  his- 


2    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

torians  themselves.  That  has  meant,  as  a  matter  of  course,  that 
not  many  except  the  critics  have  been  attracted  by  it.  Masked 
under  the  unlovely  title  Historiography,  it  has  recently  become 
a  formal  part  of  the  discipline  of  historical  seminars,  but,  with  few 
exceptions,  such  manuals  as  there  are  have  been  mainly  contribu- 
tions to  the  apparatus  of  research.  They  have,  therefore,  lacked 
the  allurements  of  style  and  often  even  of  imaginative  appeal  which 
win  readers  for  history ;  and  few  but  the  students  have  known  of 
their  existence. 

And  yet  the  history  of  History  demands  rather  than  invites  at- 
tention. Art,  science  and  philosophy  combined,  history  is  the  old- 
est and  vastest  of  the  interests  of  mankind.  What  was  the  past  to 
Babylon  or  Rome  ?  When  and  how  was  Time  first  discovered,  and 
the  shadowy  past  marked  out  by  numbered  years?  What  travel- 
ling Greeks  first  brought  home  that  knowledge  of  the  dim  antiquities 
of  Egypt  and  the  East  which  made  them  critics  of  their  own  Homeric 
legends  and  so  created  history?  What  havoc  was  wrought  in 
scientific  inquiry  by  religious  revelations  and  in  revelations  by 
scientific  inquiry  ?  By  what  miracle  has  the  long  lost  past  been  at 
last  recovered,  in  our  own  day,  so  that  we  are  checking  up  Herodotus 
by  his  own  antiquity,  correcting  the  narrative  of  Livy  or  Tacitus 
by  the  very  refuse  deposited  beneath  the  streets  upon  which  they 
walked?  This  is  more  than  romance  or  literature,  though  the 
romance  is  there  to  the  full.  For  the  history  of  History  is  the 
story  of  that  deepening  memory  and  scientific  curiosity  which  is 
the  measure  of  our  social  consciousness  and  our  intellectual  life. 

But  we  must  first  get  our  bearings.  For  the  word  "history" 
has  two  meanings.^  It  may  mean  either  the  record  of  events  or 
events   themselves.    We   call   Cromwell   a   "maker  of  history" 

^  Cf.  E.  Bemheim,  Lehrhuch  der  historischen  Methode  und  der  Gcschichtsphilosophie 
(Sth  and  6th  ed.,  1914),  Chap.  I.  The  German  word  "  Geschichte,"  meaning  that 
which  has  happened  (was  geschieht,  was  geschehen  ist),  is  even  more  misleading. 
R.  Flint,  History  of  the  Philosophy  of  History  .  .  .  (1894),  (p.  5)  called  attention  to  the 
ambiguity  of  the  term  in  English,  but  limits  his  distinction  to  the  twofold  one  of 
objective  and  subjective  history,  as  substantially  in  the  text  above.  Bemheim 
insists  (Chap.  I,  Sect.  5),  upon  introducing  a  third  category  —  the  knowledge  or 
study  of  history,  which  is  neither  the  events  nor  their  artistic  presentation  but  the 
science  of  research  (Geschichtswissenschaft).  There  is  a  suggestive  anthology  of 
definitions  in  F.  J.  Teggart's  Prolegomena  to  History  (1916),  Part  III,  Sect.  i. 


DEFINITION  AND   SCOPE  OF  HISTORY  3 

although  he  never  wrote  a  Hne  of  it.  We  even  say  that  the  historian 
merely  records  the  history  which  kings  and  statesmen  produce. 
History  in  such  instances  is  obviously  not  the  narrative  but  the 
thing  that  awaits  narration.  The  same  name  is  given  to  both  the 
object  of  the  study  and  to  the  study  itself.  The  confusion  is  un- 
fortunate. Sociology,  we  know,  deals  with  society;  biology  with 
life ;  but  history  deals  with  history !     It  is  like  juggling  with  words. 

Of  the  two  meanings,  the  larger  one  is  comparatively  recent. 
The  idea  that  events  and  people  are  historic  by  reason  of  any  quality 
of  their  own,  even  if  no  one  has  studied  or  written  upon  them,  did 
not  occur  to  the  ancients.  To  them  history  was  the  other  thing 
—  the  inquiry  and  statement,  not  the  thing  to  be  studied  or  re- 
corded. It  was  not  until  modern  times  that  the  phenomena  them- 
selves were  termed  history.  The  history  of  a  people  originally 
meant  the  research  and  narrative  of  a  historian,  not  the  evolution 
of  the  nation.  It  meant  a  work  dealing  with  the  subject,  not  the 
subject  itself.  And  this  is  logically  as  well  as  historically  the  more 
accurate  use  of  the  word.  Things  are  never  historic  in  themselves. 
They  can  be  perpetuated  out  of  the  dead  past  only  in  two  ways  : 
either  as  part  of  the  ever-moving  present,  —  as  institutions,  art, 
science,  etc.,  —  things  timeless  or  universal;  or  in  that  imaginative 
reconstruction  which  it  is  the  special  office  of  the  historian  to  provide. 

This  distinction  must  be  insisted  upon  if  we  are  to  have  any 
clear  thinking  upon  the  history  of  History.  For  obviously  in  this 
phrase  we  are  using  "history"  only  in  its  original  and  more  limited 
meaning.  We  are  dealing  with  historians,  their  methods,  their 
tools  and  their  problems ;  not  with  the  so-called  "'  makers  of  history  " 
except  as  materials  for  the  historian,  —  not  with  battles  and  con- 
stitutions and  "  historical "  events,  in  and  for  themselves,  but  only 
where  the  historian  has  treated  them.  And  it  is  his  treatment 
rather  than  the  events  themselves  which  mainly  interests  us. 

A  word  first,  however,  upon  history  in  the  wider,  looser  sense  of 
"what  has  happened."  Does  it  include  all  that  has  happened? 
If  so,  it  includes  everything;  for  the  whole  universe,  as  modern 
science  shows,  is  in  process  of  eternal  change.  It  extends  beyond 
the  phenomena  of  life  into  those  of  matter ;  for  that  vast  story  of 
evolution  from  amoeba  and  shell-fish  to  man,  whose  outlines  we  are 


4     INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

learning  to  decipher  from  the  pages  of  stratified  rock,  is  but  one 
incident  in  the  whole.  The  rocks  themselves  have  "happened" 
like  the  life  whose  traces  they  preserve.  In  short,  if  history  includes 
all  that  has  happened,  it  was  under  way  not  less  when  the  first 
stars  took  their  shape,  than  it  was  when  about  a  century  ago 
science  began  to  decipher  and  read  it. 

The  deciphering  of  such  history,  however,  is  not  the  task  of 
the  historian  but  of  the  natural  scientist.  There  is  no  harm,  to 
be  sure,  in  considering  the  analysis  of  matter  as  a  branch  of  history 
when  it  reveals  the  chemical  elements  which  have  gone  into  the 
upbuilding  of  phenomena  or  the  electron  which  is  probably  respon- 
sible for  the  element.  But  this  is  not  the  historian's  kind  of  history. 
Faced  with  such  conceptions,  he  realizes  that  he  must  content  him- 
self with  what  is  scarcely  more  than  an  infinitesimal  fraction  of  the 
vast  field  of  knowledge.  And  yet  it  is  good  for  him  to  realize  his 
place  in  that  great  fellowship  which  is  today  so  busily  at  work  upon 
the  mystery  of  the  processes  of  nature.  For,  once  he  has  had  the 
vision  of  the  process  itself,  he  can  never  face  the  old  tasks  in  the 
same  way.  It  transforms  his  perspectives,  gives  him  different 
sets  of  values  and  reconstructs  that  synthesis  of  fife  and  the  world 
into  which  he  fits  the  work  of  his  own  research.  Although  he 
realizes  the  partial  nature  of  his  outlook,  yet  it  is  not  rendered 
invalid.  On  the  contrary  it  acquires  a  greater  validity  if  it  is 
(fitted  into  the  vaster  scheme.  The  significance  of  his  work  grows 
rather  than  lessens,  in  the  light  of  the  wider  horizon.  The  per- 
spectives of  science  are  an  inspiration  for  the  historian,  even  while 
he  recognizes  that  he  can  never  master  its  original  sources  or  trace 
\its  history.  That  is  for  the  scientists  to  deal  with.  And,  as  the 
nature  of  their  phenomena  becomes  clearer  to  them,  they  are  be- 
coming, themselves,  more  and  more  historical.  The  larger  his- 
torical aspects  of  physics  and  chemistry,  to  which  we  have  just 
alluded,  are  taken  over  by  the  astronomer,  while  "natural  history" 
in  the  good  old  meaning  of  that  term  is  the  especial  province  of  the 
geologist  and  biologist.  Between  them  and  historians  the  con- 
nection is  becoming  direct  and  strong ;  and  there  is  much  to  be 
said  for  the  claim  that,  both  through  his  work  and  his  influence,  the 
greatest  of  all  historians  was  Darwin. 

But  if  History  in  the  objective  sense  is  not  all  that  has  happened, 


DEFINITION  AND    SCOPE  OF  HISTORY  5 

how  much  is  it  of  what  has  happened  ?  The  answer  to  this  has  gen- 
erally depended  upon  the  point  of  view  of  individual  historians.  All  • 
are  agreed,  for  instance,  that  the  term  "  history  "  should  be  limited 
to  substantially  human  afifairs.  And  yet  it  cannot  be  narrowly 
so  defined,  for  the  body  and  mind  of  man  belong  to  the  animal 
world  and  have  antecedents  that  reach  far  beyond  the  confines  of 
humanity,  while  the  natural  environment  of  life,  —  food,  climate, 
shelter,  etc.,  —  are  also  part  of  the  human  story.  When  we  try 
still  further  to  limit  the  term  to  some  single  fine  of  human  activity, 
as  for  instance,  poHtics,  we  shut  out  fields  in  which  the  expression 
of  the  human  spirit  has  often  been  more  significant,  the  fields  of 
culture  and  ideas,  of  Hterature,  art,  engineering,  education,  science 
or  philosophy.  Why  not,  therefore,  avoid  trouble  by  admitting 
the  whole  field  of  the  human  past  as  history  ? 

There  seems  to  be  just  one  qualification  necessary:  it  must 
be  that  past  viewed  historically,  which  means  that  the  data  must 
be  viewed  as  part  of  the  process  of  social  development,  not  as 
isolated  facts.  For  historical  facts  are  those  which  form  a  part  of 
that  great  stream  of  interrelation  which  is  Time.  ' 

This  is  still  history  in  the  objective  sense,  the  field  which  the 
historian  may  call  his  own.  But  a  careful  reading  of  our  definition 
shows  that  we  have  already  passed  over  into  a  consideration  of 
history  in  the  truer  meaning  of  the  word  —  the  performance  of  the 
historian;  since  it  is  the  attitude  assumed  toward  the  fact  which 
finally  determines  whether  it  is  to  be  considered  as  historical  or  not.) 
Now  what,  in  a  word,  is  this  historical  attitude?  It  consists,  as  we 
have  already  intimated,  in  seeing  things  in  their  relation  to  others, 
both  in  Space  and  in  Time.  Biography,  for  instance,  becomes^ 
history  when  it  considers  the  individual  in  his  setting  in  society ; 
it  is  not  history  in  so  far  as  it  deals  exclusively  with  a  single  life. 
It  may  deal  with  the  hero  as  an  isolated,  solitary  figure  or  as  a  type 
common  to  all  times.  In  either  case  it  lacks  the  historical  point 
of  view,  for  it  is  only  by  connecting  the  individual  with  his  own^ 
society  that  he  enters  into  that  great  general  current  of  events 
which  we  call  Time.  The  study  of  any  farmer's  life,  as  a  farmer'^j 
life,  set  in  the  unending  routine  of  the  seasons  is  almost  as  timeless 
as  the  study  of  Shakespeare's  mind.  The  New  England  farmer, 
on  the  other  hand,  and  the  Elizabethan  Shakespeare  enter  the  field 


6     INTRODUCTION   TO   THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

of  history  because  they  are  considered  in  their  setting  in  society ; 

(and  society  is  the  reservoir  of  time,  the  ever-changing,  ever-enduring 

[i;eflex  of  human  events. 

The  same  tests  that  apply  to  biography  apply  to  antiquarian 
research.  Because  an  event  belongs  to  the  past  it  is  not  neces- 
sarily historical.  Indeed  in  so  far  as  the  antiquarian  isolates  his 
material  for  our  inspection,  interested  in  it  for  its  own  sake,  laying  it 
out  like  the  curator  of  a  museum,  he  robs  it  of  its  historical  char- 

/acter.  For  the  facts  of  history  do  not  exist  by  themselves  any 
more  than  the  lives  of  historical  personages.  They  are  parts  of  a 
process  and  acquire  meaning  only  when  seen  in  action.  The  anti- 
quarian preserves  the  fragments  of  the  great  machinery  of  events, 
but  the  historian  sets  it  to  work  again,  however  faintly  the  sound 

I  of  its  motion  comes  to  him  across  the  distant  centuries.^ 

History  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  word  began  with  the  Greeks. 
They  had  already  surpassed  the  world  in  the  purely  art  creation  of 
the  epic,  where  the  imagination  urging  the  laggard  movement  of 
events  secures  the  dynamism  of  the  past  which  is  the  first  condi- 
tion of  history.  Then  they  turned  from  poetry  to  prose,  and  in 
sobriety  and  self-restraint  began  to  criticise  their  own  legends, 
to  see  if  they  were  true.  Before  the  sixth  century  B.C.,  so  far  as  we 
know,  no  critical  hand  had  attempted  to  sort  out  the  data  of  the 
past,  impelled  by  the  will  to  disbelieve.  This  revolutionary  mood, 
as  happy  in  finding  what  had  not  happened  as  what  had,  marks 
the  emergence  of  the  scientific  spirit  into  the  great  art  of  story- 
telling.    History  in  the  true  sense  is  the  combination  of  the  two. 

The  word  "history"  ^  itself  comes  to  us  from  these  sixth  century 
lonians  and  is  the  name  they  gave  to  their  achievement.  It  meant, 
not  the  telling  of  a  tale,  but  the  search  for  knowledge  and  the  truth. 

1  It  will  be  seen  that  this  conception  is  practically  identical  with  that  which  Bern- 
heim  develops  with  such  care  in  his  manual,  p.  9.  His  definition  of  history,  in  this 
subjective  sense  of  the  word,  runs  as  follows : 

"  Die  Geschichtswissenschaft  ist  die  Wissenschaf t,  welche  die  zeitlich  und  raumlich 
bestimmten  Tatsachen  der  Entwicklung  der  Menschen  in  ihren  (singularen  wie 
typischen  und  koUektiven)  Betatigungen  als  soziale  Wesen  im  Zusammenhange 
psycho-physicher  Kausalitat  erforscht  und  darstellt." 

The  expression  "  Kausalitat  "  he  explains  later  in  quite  a  Bergsonian  sense.  It 
is  not  mechanistic.  Cf.  Chap.  I,  Sect.  4,  pp.  loi  sqq.  A  study  of  Bergson's  conception 
of  Time  would  help  to  elucidate  Bernheim  and  to  elaborate  the  idea  of  the  text  above. 

2  Ionic  IffTopirj,  Attic  l<jTopla,     {Vide  infra,  p.  135.) 


DEFINITION  AND   SCOPE   OF  HISTORY  7 

It  was  to  them  much  what  philosophy  was  to  the  later  Athenians 
or  science  to  us.^  The  historian  was  the  critical  inquirer.  Herod-  ' 
otus  was  as  much  an  investigator  and  explorer  as  a  reciter  of  narra- 
tive, and  his  life-long  investigation  was  ''history"  in  his  Ionian 
speech.^  Yet  Herodotus  himself  hints  that  the  word  may  also  be 
applied  to  the  story  which  the  research  has  made  possible,^  not  to 
the  guileless  tale  of  the  uncritical,  to  be  sure,  but  to  a  narrative 
such  as  he  and  his  soberly  inquisitive  fellows  could  tell.  It  was 
not  until  Aristotle,^  and  more  especially  Polybius,''  that  we  have  it 
definitely  applied  to  the  literary  product  instead  of  to  the  inquiry 
which  precedes  it.  From  Polybius  to  modern  times,  history  (Latin, 
historia)  has  been  literature.  It  is  a  strange  but  happy  coinci- 
dence, that  when  the  scientific  investigator  of  today  turns  from 
literature  to  scholarship,  from  writing  books  to  discovering  facts, 
he  is  turning  not  away  from  but  towards  the  field  of  history  as  the 
word  was  understood  by  those  forerunners  of  Herodotus  to  whom 
science  was  as  yet  but  a  dream  and  an  aspiration.^ 

This  double  aspect  of  history  —  the  one  no  older  than  Ionia, 
the  other  reaching  back  to  the  dawn  of  Time  —  has  apparently 
puzzled  a  good  many  who  write  about  it.  There  are  those  who  try 
to  prove  that  history  is  either  a  science  or  an  art,  when,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  it  contains  the  elements  of  both.  We  shall  recur  to  this  in  a 
later  section,  where  we  shall  have  to  face  the  further  question  of  the 
relation  of  art  to  science  in  general.  But  without  entering  into 
that  problem  yet,  we  may  for  the  present,  with  a  view  to  clarity, 
frankly  divide  our  subject  into  two :  the  research  which  is  science 
and  the  narration  which  is  art. 

The  history  of  these  two  divisions  runs  in  different  channels, 

^Cf.  Gilbert  Murray,  A  History  of  Ancient  Greek  Literature  (1912),  p.  123. 

2  Cf.  the  opening  sentence,  "This  is  the  setting  forth  of  the  researches  of  Herodotus 
of  Halicarnassus,"  etc.  ^  Cf.  Bic.  VII,  Chap.  XCVI. 

^  Cf.  Aristotle,  Rhetoric,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  IV,  Sect.  8  {cf.  note  in  E.  M.  Cope  and 
J.  E.  Sandys'  edition)  and  Sect.  13 ;   Poetry,  Chap.  IX. 

6  Cf.  Polybius,  The  Histories,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  III. 

^  The  achievement  of  the  Hebrew  historians  was  primarily  in  the  field  of  art.  Al- 
though sections  of  the  early  records  of  the  Jews  are  the  finest  narrative  we  possess 
from  so  early  a  date,  —  far  earlier  than  any  similar  product  in  Greece,  —  the  prin- 
ciples of  criticism  which  determined  the  text  were  not  what  we  should  call  scientific. 
They  were  not  sufficiently  objective.     [Vide  infra,  p.  79.) 


8    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

^nd  has  always  done  so.  History,  the  art,  flourishes  with  the  arts. 
It  is  mainly  the  creature  of  imagination  and  literary  style.  It 
depends  upon  expression,  upon  vivid  painting,  sympathy,  grace 
and  elegance,  elevated  sentiments  or  torrential  power.  The 
picture  may  be  partial  or  incorrect  —  like  Carlyle's  description  of 
revolutionary  France;  sympathies  may  warp  the  truth,  as  in 
Froude's  Henry  VIII  or  Macaulay's  History  of  England;  elegance 
of  style  may  carry  even  Gibbon  beyond  the  data  in  his  sources,  and 
the  passionate  eloquence  of  Michelet  ride  down  the  restrictions 
of  sober  fact.  But  in  the  art  of  history-narration  these  are  magnifi- 
cent even  if  they  are  not  true.  Indeed  the  art  in  history  seems  to 
run,  with  most  perverse  intent,  in  the  opposite  direction  to  the 
science.  Wherever  the  great  masters  of  style  have  dominated, 
there  one  is  likely  to  find  less  interest  in  criticising  sources  than 
in  securing  effects.  The  historian's  method  of  investigation  often 
seems  to  weaken  in  proportion  as  his  rhetoric  improves.  This  is 
not  always  true,  but  it  is  sufficiently  common  to  make  the  scien- 
tific historian  eternally  distrustful  of  the  literary.  The  distrust 
in  the  long  run  has  its  sobering  effect  upon  the  literary  historian, 
in  spite  of  his  contemptuous  references  to  the  researcher  as  a  dry- 
as-dust  who  lacks  insight,  the  first  qualification  of  the  historian. 
And  from  the  standpoint  of  supreme  historical  achievement  both 
criticisms  are  justified.  The  master  of  research  is  generally  but  a 
poor  artist,  and  his  uncolored  picture  of  the  past  will  never  rank  in 
literature  beside  the  splendid  distortions  which  glow  in  the  pages 
of  a  Michelet  or  a  Macaulay,  simply  because  he  lacks  the  human 
sympathy  which  vitalizes  the  historical  imagination.  The  diffi- 
culty, however,  in  dealing  with  the  art  in  history  is  that,  being 
largely  conditioned  upon  genius,  it  has  no  single,  traceable  line  of 
development.  Here  the  product  of  the  age  of  Pericles  remains 
unsurpassed  still ;  the  works  of  Herodotus  and  Thucydides  standing 
like  the  Parthenon  itself,  —  models  for  all  time. 

On  the  other  hand,  history,  the  science,  has  a  development  and 
logical  history  of  its  own.  Paralleling  other  scientific  work,  it  has 
come  to  the  front  in  our  own  age,  so  that  it  has  not  only  gained 
recognition  among  historians  as  a  distinct  subject,  but  by  the 
results  of  its  obscure  and  patient  labors  it  has  recast  for  us  almost 

\the  whole  outline  of  our  evolution.     Impartial,  —  almost  unhuman 


DEFINITION  AND    SCOPE  OF  HISTORY  9 

in  its  cold  impartiality,  —  weighing  documents,  accumulating 
evidence,  sorting  out  the  false  wherever  it  can  be  detected,  no 
matter  what  venerable  belief  goes  with  it,  it  is  piecing  together  with 
infinite  care  the  broken  mosaic  of  the  past,  —  not  to  teach  us  lessons 
nor  to  entertain,  but  simply  to  fulfil  the  imperative  demand  of  the 
scientific  spirit  —  to  find  the  truth  and  set  it  forth.  _7 

It  is  this  scientific  history  —  this  modern  fulfilment  of  the  old 
Greek  historia  —  which  is  responsible  for  the  development  of  that 
group  of  auxiliary  sciences  of  which  archaeology  is  the  most  notable, 
by  means  of  which  the  scope  of  history  has  been  extended  so  far 
beyond  the  written  or  oral  records.  The  advance  along  this  line, 
during  the  nineteenth  and  twentieth  centuries,  has  been  one  of  the 
greatest  achievements  of  our  age.  The  vast  gulf  which  separates 
the  history  of  Egypt  by  Professor  Breasted  of  Chicago  from  that  of 
Herodotus  gives  but  a  partial  measure  of  its  achievement.  By  the 
mechanism  now  at  his  disposal,  the  scientific  explorer  can  read  more 
history  from  the  rubbish  heaps  buried  in  the  desert  sand  than  the 
greatest  traveller  of  antiquity  could  gather  from  the  priests  of 
Thebes. 

This  history  of  scientific  history,  from  the  Greeks  to  our  time, 
is,  therefore,  the  central  thread  of  our  story.  But  a  proper  historical 
treatment  of  it  must  not  be  limited  narrowly  to  it  alone.  It  in- 
cludes as  well  the  long  pre-scientific  and  the  subsequent  unscientific 
achievements.  All  of  these  belong,  more  or  less,  to  our  subject. 
Indeed,  in  so  far  as  they  exhibit  any  clear  sign  of  that  sense  of  the 
interrelation  of  events  which  we  have  emphasized  above,  they  are 
history,  —  winning  their  place  by  their  art  if  not  by  their  science. 
One  must  not  omit,  for  instance,  the  work  of  mediaeval  monks,"? 
although  they  copied  impossible  events  into  solemn  annals  without 
a  sense  of  the  absurdity,  and  although  individually  they  are  the 
last  to  deserve  the  title  of  artists.  For  they  had,  after  all,  a  vision 
of  the  process  of  history,  and  one  which  was  essentially  artistic. 
The  Christian  Epic,  into  which  they  transcribed  their  prosy  lines, 
was  as  genuine  an  art-product  as  the  Greek  or  Babylonian,  although 
it  was  one  which  only  the  composite  imagination  of  religious  faith 
could  achieve.  The  history  of  History  must  deal  with  such  things  , 
—  historically. 


lo    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

The  same  is  true  of  the  pre-scientific  origins.  These  He  un- 
numbered centuries  beyond  that  comparatively  modern  world  of 
Hecataeus  and  Herodotus.  They  reach  back,  indeed,  to  the  dawn  of 
memory  —  when,  as  we  suppose,  some  descendants  of  those  shaggy, 
simian  brutes  of  the  tertiary  forests  and  caves,  which  were  destined 
to  produce  humanity,  first  learned,  however  dimly,  to  distinguish 
past  from  present.  This  means  that  the  origins  of  history  are  as 
old  as  mankind.  For  the  dawn  of  memory  was  the  dawn  of  con- 
sciousness. No  other  acquisition,  except  that  of  speech,  was  so 
fateful  for  humanity.  Memory  —  the  thing  which  binds  one's  life 
together,  which  makes  me,  me  and  you,  you,  which  enables  us  to 
recognize  ourselves  of  yesterday  in  ourselves  of  today,  that  repro- 
duction of  the  dead  past  thrilling  once  more  with  life  and  passion, 
that  magic  glass  that  holds  the  unfading  reflection  of  what  exists 
no  more  —  what  a  miracle  it  is  !  Destroy  memory  and  you  destroy 
time  so  far  as  you  and  I  are  concerned.  The  days  and  the  years 
may  pass  along,  each  with  its  burden  of  work  or  its  boon  of  rest,  but 
they  pass  from  the  nothingness  of  the  future  to  the  nothingness  of 
the  past  like  the  falling  of  drops  of  rain  upon  the  ocean.  The  past 
fexists  in  the  memory  as  the  future  in  the  imagination.  Conscious- 
ness is  itself  but  the  structure  built  upon  this  tenuous  bridge  be- 
tween the  two  eternities  of  the  unknown,  and  history  is  the  record 
of  what  has  taken  place  therein.  Memory,  in  short,  reveals  the 
\world  as  a  process,  and  so  makes  its  data  historical. 

At  first  glance  it  might  seem  absurd  to  carry  our  origins  back  so 
far.  We  have  been  used  to  thinking  of  early  history  as  a  thing 
of  poetry  and  romance,  born  of  myth  and  embodied  in  epic.  It 
demands  a  flight  of  the  imagination  to  begin  it  not  with  rhythmic 
and  glowing  verse  but  almost  with  the  dawn  of  speech.  But  the 
origins  of  history  begin  back  yonder,  with  the  very  beginning  of 
mankind,  before  the  glaciers  swept  our  valleys  to  the  sea,  instead 
of  by  the  camp-fires  of  Aryan  warriors  or  in  the  clamorous  square 
of  the  ancient  city.  When  men  first  learned  to  ask  —  or  tell  —  in 
grunts  and  signs  "what  happened,"  history  became  inevitable. 
And  from  that  dim,  far-off  event  until  the  present,  its  data  have 
included  all  that  has  flashed  upon  the  consciousness  of  men  so  as  to 
leave  its  reflection  or  burn  in  its  scar.  Its  threads  have  been  broken, 
tangled  and  lost.     Its  pattern  cannot  be  deciphered  beyond  a  few 


DEFINITION  AND   SCOPE   OF   HISTORY  ii 

thousand  years,  for,  at  first,  the  shuttle  of  Time  tore  as  it  wove  the 
fabric  of  social  Hfe,  and  we  can  only  guess  by  the  rents  and  gashes 
what  forces  were  at  work  upon  it.  What  we  do  know,  however,  is 
that  although  history  itself  in  the  true  sense  of  the  term  did  not 
start  until  midway  down  the  process  of  social  evolution,  when  the 
social  memory  was  already  continuous,  when  deeds  were  inscribed 
on  monuments,  and  the  critical  spirit  was  at  work,  —  in  short  when 
civilization  had  begun,  —  still  the  prehistoric  history  is  of  more 
than  mere  speculative  interest ;  for  civilization  continued  the 
pattern  begun  for  it,  and  anthropology  has  shown  us  how  absurd 
has  been  our  interpretation  of  what  civilized  man  has  been  thinking 
and  doing,  so  long  as  we  have  ignored  his  uncivilized,  ancestral 
training. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE 

For  the  general  treatment  of  the  problems  of  the  historian,  see  Ernst 
Bernheim,  Lehrbuch  der  historischcn  Methode  und  der  Geschichtsphilosophie 
(5th  and  6th  ed.,  1914) ;  C.  V.  Langlois  and  C.  Seignobos,  Introduction  to  the 
Study  of  History  (tr.  1898)  and  C.  V.  Langlois,  Manuel  de  hihliographie  his- 
torique  (2d  ed.,  1901-1904).  The  sketch  of  the  general  subject  in  the  article 
History  in  the  eleventh  edition  of  The  Encydopcedia  Britannica  was  the 
starting  point  for  this  study.  It  would  be  well,  however,  to  read  first  The 
New  History  (191 2),  by  James  Harvey  Robinson. 

For  ancient  history  in  general  an  important  manual  is  that  of  C.  Wachs- 
muth,  Eifileitiing  in  das  Studium  der  altcn  Geschichte  (1895).  For  mediaeval 
historiography  such  works  as  W.  Wattenbach's  Dcutschlands  Gcschichtsquellen 
im  Mittelalter  (2  vols.,  6th  ed.,  1893-1894)  or  A.  MoUnier's  Les  sources  de 
Vhistoire  de  France  (6  vols.,  1901-1906),  are  adequate  in  their  respective  fields. 
No  similar  survey  exists  of  English  mediaeval  historians.  For  the  modern 
field  E.  Tueter^s  Geschichte  der  neueren  Historio graphic  (191 1,  there  is  also  a 
French  edition,  1914)  covers  the  ground  from  Machiavelli  to  about  1870, 
while  such  works  as  G.  P.  Gooch's  History  and  Historians  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century  (1913),  or  A.  Guilland's  Modern  Germany  and  Her  Historians  (191S; 
the  French  edition  appeared  in  1900),  deal  with  important  topics.  R.  FHnt's 
History  of  the  Philosophy  of  History,  Historical  Philosophy  in  France  and 
French  Belgium  and  Switzerland  (1894)  is  preceded  by  a  short  general  survey. 
B.  Croce's  Theory  and  History  of  Historiography  (translated  by  D.  Ainslie,  1921) 
has  somewhat  more  theory  than  history,  but  it  is  found  stimulating  by  the 
philosophically  inclined.     For  more  specific  references  see  below. 


CHAPTER  II 
PREHISTORY;    MYTH  AND  LEGEND 

Although  the  origins  of  History  are  as  old  as  humanity,  the 
history  of  History  reaches  back  to  no  such  dim  antiquity.  There 
was  story-telling  by  the  camp-fires  of  the  cave-men,  before  the  ice- 
sheets  had  receded  or  the  continents  had  taken  their  shape,  when 
the  Thames  emptied  into  the  Rhine  and  the  British  Channel  was 
the  valley  of  the  Seine.  But  no  trace  remains  of  the  tales  that 
were  told.  Anthropology  may  surmise  something  of  their  content 
from  the  study  of  savages  today ;  but  the  history  we  reconstruct 
from  the  chipped  stones  and  burial  mounds  of  our  prehistoric 
ancestors  is  our  own,  not  theirs.  It  is  a  closing  chapter,  not  the 
opening,  of  the  history  of  History.^ 

The  term  "  prehistoric  history  "  is,  therefore,  new.  Once,  not 
so  very  long  ago,  prehistory  meant  what  it  seems  to  say ;  it  im- 
plied in  a  general  way  that  there  were  ages  or  peoples  prior  to  those 
known  to  us,  which  were  devoid  of  history.  One  did  not  generally 
stop  to  inquire  whether  they  themselves  were  devoid  of  it  or  whether 
it  was  ourselves  who  were  devoid  of  whatever  history  they  may  have 
had.  In  either  case  the  main  point  was  clear;  the  term  was  a 
general  negative.  Its  application  on  the  other  hand  was  definite ; 
it  referred  to  what  lay  beyond  the  Old  Testament,  Herodotus  and 
a  few  other  texts  from  the  classics.  For  what  lay  beyond  them  was 
an  unreal  world  of  myth  and  legend,  vague  in  outline,  irrecoverable. 

In  our  own  day  all  this  has  changed.  Archaeology,  pushing  the 
frontiers  of  knowledge  into  that  seemingly  impenetrable  past,  has 
enlarged  the  field  of  history,  both  by  the  recovery  of  texts  written 

^  It  may  not  be  out  of  place,  however,  to  refer,  for  a  general  study  of  the  field,  to 
such  manuals  as  H.  F.  Osborn,  Men  of  the  Old  Stone  Age  (1915),  with  good  bibliography 
and  illustrative  material ;  to  W.  J.  Sollas,  Ancient  Hunters  (2d  ed.,  1915) ;  H.  Obermaier, 
Der  Mensch  der  Vorzeit  (191 2),  and,  for  detailed  study,  the  exhaustive  work  of  J. 
Dechelette,  Manuel  d'archeologie  prehistoriqiie,  celtique  et  gallo-romaine  (2  vols., 
1908-1914).  The  prehistory  of  Egypt,  Babylonia  and  the  /Egean  is  now  treated  in 
the  archseological  studies  devoted  to  those  special  fields. 


PREHISTORY;    MYTH  AND   LEGEND  13 

over  a  thousand  years  before  the  oldest  texts  of  the  Bible,  and  by 
its  own,  modern  story  of  still  more  remote  antiquities.  Since  this 
latter  is  the  more  comprehensive,  —  and  the  more  important,  — 
it,  rather  than  the  work  of  any  hieroglyphic  or  cuneiform  writer, 
is  commonly  taken  as  the  measure  of  the  field  of  history,  and  its 
farther  limits  as  the  boundaries  between  the  historical  and  the  pre- 
historical.  Strictly  taken,  this  would  mean  that  those  boundaries 
would  shift  with  every  new  discovery  of  archaeology,  and  as  the 
result  would  be  unending  confusion,  it  is  custoniary  now  to  regard 
the  whole  field  in  which  the  archaeologist  can  find  any  recorded 
texts  as  lying  within  the  field  of  history.  The  test  for  the  distinc- 
tion between  history  and  prehistory  is  therefore  the  existence  — 
or  persistence  —  of  inscriptions,  since  upon  them  depend  the 
possibilities  of  history.  Even  where  the  inscriptions  are  not  yet 
deciphered,  the  fact  of  their  existence  makes  their  field  potential 
history.  The  implements  are  at  hand  by  which,  some  day,  the  past 
from  which  they  came  shall  be  known ;  and  if  at  present  we  have 
not  learned  to  use  them,  the  confident  movement  of  modern  scholar- 
ship includes  them  in  the  field  of  history  along  with  those  already 
mastered.^  The  distinction  between  history  and  prehistory  has 
in  it  a  certain  flavor  of  anticipation  as  well  as  of  achievement  and 
does  not  always  meet  the  facts  of  the  case.  Where  this  anticipa- 
tion involves  too  great  a  strain  upon  one's  faith,  it  is  at  times  dis- 
regarded ;  but  upon  the  whole  it  is  as  good  a  distinction  as  has  been 
found,  and  the  archaeologist  is  justifying  it  by  works. 

The  prehistoric  is,  therefore,  to  be  used  not  so  much  in  the  sense 
of  the  pre-known  past,  —  since  much  inside  the  field  of  history 
remains  unknown  and  on  the  other  hand  much  beyond  it  is  known, 
—  as  the  pre-inscriptional  or  pre-literary,^    This,  at  first  sight,  may 

*  In  a  sense  the  meaning  has  not  changed  so  much  as  might  seem ;  for  when  the 
field  of  history  did  not  reach  beyond  the  Bible  and  Herodotus,  the  hieroglyphs  were 
unread  and  the  key  to  them  supposedly  lost  for  all  time.  So  the  oldest  texts  limited 
the  field  of  history. 

^  Hittite  or  Cretan  cultures  are  not  viewed  as  prehistoric  although  their  inscrip- 
tions are  still  unread.  The  "prehistoric"  element  in  Crete  preceded  all  the  Minoan 
eras.  One  may  say,  however,  that  the  term  "  prehistory"  is  used  upon  the  whole 
with  something  of  the  vagueness  of  the  term  "  history."  Different  writers  use  it  dif- 
ferently. Sometimes  it  seems  to  mean  the  history  of  peoples  devoid  of  civilization,  in 
particular  of  those  in  the  stone  age,  preceding  the  age  of  metals.  So,  especially,  in 
Egyptian  histories. 


14    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

seem  a  very  inadequate  test,  since  inscriptions  furnish  even  the 
literary  archaeologist  with  only  a  meagre  portion  of  the  sources 
from  which  he  pieces  together  his  story.  But  in  reality  it  is  as 
nearly  decisive  as  anything  can  be.  It  marks  the  line  between  the 
possibilities  of  narratives  about  definite  persons  and  the  vague 
movements  of  peoples,  —  in  short,  the  line  between  the  particular 
and  the  general.  But  more  than  this,  writing  alone,  among  all  the 
sources  of  history,  preserves  events.  Monuments  furnish  only 
hints  and  implications  of  them.  The  stone  circles  of  Stonehenge 
indicate  that  once  a  numerous  tribe  concentrated  its  energy  upon 
a  great  achievement.  But  we  do  not  know  what  tribe  it  was  or 
what  motive,  religious  or  monumental,  led  to  this  concentration  of 
energy.  All  we  have  is  the  achievement.  Even  drawings,  unless 
they  have  some  word  or  sign  attached,  do  not  perpetuate  definite 
events.  The  bison  drawn  by  the  palaeolithic  cave-men  may  be 
symbols  from  the  realm  of  magic  or  memories  of  the  hunt,  there  is 
no  way  of  knowing  which.  The  hieroglyph,  which  is  half-picture, 
half-writing,  can  arrange  its  succession  of  symbols  so  that  by  the 
addition  of  many,  side  by  side,  a  sort  of  moving-picture  narrative 
is  told.  But  only  writing,  that  mobile  medium,  responsive  to 
changing  fact,  can  record  motives  or  deal  with  action ;  and  these 
are  the  proper  themes  of  history.^ 

The  field  of  prehistory  is  joined  with  that  of  history  by  archae- 
ology, which  works  with  impartial  zeal  in  both,  though  with  dif- 
ferent methods.  In  the  prehistoric  field,  since  the  documents  are 
lacking,  it  can  only  verify  its  conclusions  by  the  comparison  of  the 
remains  of  the  culture  of  unknown  peoples  with  the  output  of  similar 

1  The  mention  of  the  moving-picture  suggests  that,  if  the  test  for  the  distinction 
between  prehistory  and  history  is  the  use  of  writing,  we  may  be  at  another  boundary- 
mark  today.  Writing,  after  all,  is  but  a  poor  makeshift.  When  one  compares  the 
best  of  writings  with  what  they  attempt  to  record,  one  sees  that  this  instrument  of 
ours  for  the  reproduction  of  reality  is  almost  palaeolithic  in  its  crudity.  It  loses 
even  the  color  and  tone  of  living  speech,  as  speech,  in  turn,  reproduces  but  part  of 
the  psychic  and  physical  complex  with  which  it  deals.  We  can  at  best  sort  out  a  few 
facts  from  the  moving  mass  of  events  and  dress  them  up  in  the  imperfections  of  our 
rhetoric,  to  survive  as  fading  simulacra  in  the  busy  forum  of  the  world.  Some  day 
the  media  in  which  we  work  today  to  preserve  the  past  will  be  seen  in  all  their  in- 
adequacy and  crudity  when  new  implements  for  mirroring  thought,  expression  and 
movement  will  have  been  acquired.  Then  we,  too,  may  be  numbered  among  the 
prehistoric. 


PREHISTORY;    MYTH  AND   LEGEND  15 

cultures  today.  This  is  the  comparative  method  of  anthropology 
which  has  thus  been  called  into  service  to  enable  us  to  recover 
the  unrecorded  past  before  history  began.  Tasmanian  savages  a 
generation  ago  or  African  Bushmen  today  illustrate  the  life  and 
society  of  the  men  of  the  old  stone  age  in  Europe.^  Where  bone 
implements  are  added  to  the  primitive  equipment  and  tools  of 
the  hunt  become  more  efficient,  the  Esquimaux  may  furnish  a 
clue  not  only  as  to  the  mode  of  life  but  even  as  to  the  mental  out- 
look. So  on,  through  varying  grades  of  culture,  the  comparative 
method  tests  the  sources  of  archaeology  by  data  of  anthropology. 
This  is  not  the  place  to  enter  into  a  critical  description  of  such 
a  method ;  but  it  may  not  be  out  of  place,  as  we  pass  along,  to  repeat 
the  warning  which  anthropologists  have  frequently  issued,  that 
there  is  no  more  treacherous  method  in  the  scientific  world  today 
than  this  use  of  analogies,  which  at  first  sight  seems  so  easy.  One 
should  be  trained  in  the  method  of  anthropology  before  using  it, 
just  as  one  should  be  trained  in  the  use  of  historical  sources  before 
writing  history.  In  the  first  place,  the  things  compared  must  be 
really  comparable.  This  sounds  like  an  absurdly  elementary  prin- 
ciple, and  yet  a  vast  amount  of  anthropological  history  has  been 
written  in  disregard  of  it.  Institutions  from  different  tribes,  which 
bear  an  external  resemblance,  have  been  torn  from  their  setting, 
massed  together  and  made  the  basis  of  sweeping  generalizations  as 
to  the  general  scheme  of  social  evolutions ;  and  the  data  of  the 
prehistoric  world  have  then  been  interpreted  in  the  light  of  inferences 

1  The  frankest  use  of  such  a  method  in  this  particular  field  is  that  of  W.  J.  Sollas 
in  Ancient  Hunters. 

For  examples  of  the  comparative  method  as  applied  by  the  earlier  anthropologists, 
accompanied  by  a  thoroughgoing  criticism  (by  John  Dewey),  see  W.  I.  Thomas,  Source 
Book  for  Social  Origins  (1909),  Part  II  {Mental  Life  and  Education).  A  long  bibliog- 
raphy is  appended  to  the  section.  The  numerous  works  of  Franz  Boas,  as  well  as 
those  of  his  former  students,  furnish  both  direction  and  example  in  sound  methods  in 
anthropology;  hi?,  Anthropology  (1908)  has  been  supplemented  by  various  studies. 
The  student  of  history  need  not  deal  with  W.  Wundt's  Volkcr psychologic  (9  vols., 
1911-1919)  or  L.  Levy-Bruhl's  Les  fonctions  mentales  dans  les  societes  inferieurcs 
(1910),  although  he  will  gain  much  from  a  criticism  of  the  latter  by  A.  A.  Golden- 
weiser  in  American  Anthropologist,  New  Series,  Vol.  XIII  (191 1),  pp.  121-130;  but  he 
should  at  very  least  read  R.  R.  Marett's  little  sketch  of  the  field  and  method.  An- 
thropology, in  the  Home  University  series  (191 2),  while  E.  B.  Tylor's  Primitive  Cul- 
ture, although  first  published  years  ago,  is  still  as  valuable  as  it  is  delightful  (2  vols., 
6th  ed.,  1920). 


i6      INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY   OF  HISTORY 

from  these  conclusions.  Such  schemes  are  not  history  but  specula- 
tion ;  some  of  them  may  even  yet  be  verified  by  fact  and  turn  out 
to  be  true.  But  the  historian  should  not  mistake  their  character. 
If  his  training  in  the  historical  method  has  amounted  to  anything, 
he  should  not  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that  phenomena  are  never  quite 
the  same  outside  of  their  environment,  for  the  environment  is  part 
of  them.  The  significance  of  an  institution  depends  not  so  much 
upon  its  existence  or  form  as  upon  its  use. 

However,  within  broad  limits  and  used  with  due  caution,  the 
comparative  method  may  furnish  an  anthropological  history  of  the 
prehistoric  world.  It  can  suggest  manners  and  customs  and  even, 
—  what  alone  concerns  us  here,  —  a  glimpse  of  the  mental  outlook 
of  peoples  who  have  kept  no  history  of  their  own.  For,  in  a  general 
way,  the  reactions  of  all  men  in  similar  circumstances  are  alike. 
The  tales  they  tell  in  Mexico  resemble  those  of  ancient  Babylon, 
Heroes  perform  almost  the  same  feats  through  the  entire  semi- 
savage  world,  varied  only  by  the  local  conditions,  and  the  mysteries 
of  Olympian  councils  are  disclosed  in  recognizable  terms. 

Now,  upon  the  whole,  it  is  the  case  that  tales  are  told  only  when 
they  are  worth  telling,  and  the  test  as  to  whether  they  are  worth 
telling  or  not  is  whether  they  are  listened  to.  This  furnishes  us 
with  a  clue  as  to  their  general  character,  for  men  do  not  gather 
willingly  to  listen  about  commonplace  things  of  daily  routine,  — 
which,  so  far  as  possible,  have  been  turned  over  to  the  women.  Just 
as  the  men  have  taken  to  themselves  the  careers  of  adventure,  of 
war  and  the  chase,  they  wish  to  make  their  tales  adventures  of  the 
mind.  This  means  that  the  universal  content  of  all  early  tales  is 
myth.^  For  myth  alone  can  supply  enough  of  the  element  of 
surprise,  of  the  strange  and  mysterious.     In  the  world  of  luck  and 

1  The  term  myth  is  used  here  in  the  definite  sense  of  the  tale  involving  super- 
natural elements.  It  is  also  used  in  English  loosely  to  include  all  legendary  material. 
The  instances  cited  in  the  Oxford  dictionary  furnish  a  commentary  upon  the  unformed 
state  of  thinking  in  this  field.  The  classic  chapters  on  mythology  in  E.  B.  Tylor's 
Primitive  Culture  should  be  read  in  this  connection.  There  are  good  articles  in  recent 
encyclopaedias  and  the  rich  field  of  anthropology  is  rapidly  supplying  whole  libraries 
of  material.  A  popular  and  worthy  enterprise  is  the  collection  of  thirteen  volumes, 
The  Mythology  of  All  Races,  edited  by  L.  H.  Gray,  of  which  the  first  three  volumes 
appeared  in  1916.  The  publications  of  the  American  Bureau  of  Ethnology  at  Wash- 
ington furnish  a  wealth  of  material  of  great  interest  in  this  regard. 


PREHISTORY;  MYTH  AND   LEGEND  17 

miracle,  with  its  constant  possibility  of  dramatic  turns,  the  dramatis 
persona  are  mainly  supernatural.  The  explanation  of  this  lies  in  the 
tendency  of  the  savage  to  "animize"  his  world.  Dawn  and  clouds, 
fire,  running  water,  dark  caves  or  groves,  animals,  queer  things 
or  people,  whatever  strikes  his  fancy  and  remains  un-understood, 
is  likely  to  become  a  "presence,"  an  uncanny  something  that  lies 
in  that  fearsome  realm  where  things  are  lucky  or  unlucky  in  their 
own  right,  sacred  or  accursed,  acting  irresponsibly  or,  in  any  case, 
beyond  the  normal  line  of  mere  human  conduct.  The  world  is  so 
full  of  these  uncanny  things  that  the  story  of  even  daily  life  among 
primitive  peoples  is  bound  to  contain  enough  myth  to  condemn  it 
utterly  in  a  rationalist  society.  And  yet  it  may  be  mainly  true  — 
true  to  the  experiences  of  its  authors  and  perpetuators. 

The  commonest  theme  of  such  myths  is  that  which  gives  the 
savage  mind  its  greatest  adventure,  the  myth  of  the  origin  of  things. 
All  people  have  their  versions  of  Genesis.  The  curiosity  which 
prompts  one  to  keep  asking  how  the  story  ends  is  not  less  keen  in 
inquiring  how  it  began.  Where  different  people  have  lived  much 
alike,  the  explanations  of  their  similar  worlds  are  strikingly  similar. 
One  can  match  not  a  few  of  the  elements  in  the  Hebrew  Book  of 
Origins  by  the  myths  of  the  savage  world.  But  this  is  too  varied 
and  too  unhistorical  a  problem  for  us  to  pursue  in  detail  here. 

The  world  of  myth  is  one  of  miracle,  where  gods  and  even  heroes 
are  transformed  before  one's  eyes,  where,  as  in  a  land  of  dreams, 
animals  talk,  invisible  presences  are  heard  along  the  winds,  trees 
imprison  and  earth  engulfs.  So  unreal  do  these  seem  to  the  civilized 
man  that  he  thinks  of  them  as  the  conscious  effort  of  invention, 
a  product  of  that  poetic  capacity  which  he  takes  for  granted  in 
early  peoples.  But,  however  strongly  the  fancy  plays  in  simple 
minds,  the  myth  is  seldom,  if  ever,  the  creation  of  individual,  con- 
scious effort,  —  the  result  of  a  single  expedition  of  the  questing 
intelligence.  It  is  rather  the  booty  of  the  tribe,  the  heritage  from 
immemorial  quests.  The  shaman  or  priest  may  mould  mytholo- 
gies and  transform  them,  as  the  epic  poet  may  develop  original 
incidents  in  his  legend,  but  the  range  of  his  creative  imagination 
is  anything  but  bold  and  free  in  the  sense  in  which  Plato  thought 
of  its  freedom.  For  instance,  when  Homer  makes  Athene  take 
the  form  of  a  swallow  he  is  not  inventing  as  KipUng  may  have  done 


i8    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

in  his  Jungle  Tales.  Athene,  or  some  such  goddess,  had  been  trans- 
forming herself  for  untold  centuries  before  Homer  embodied  the 
miraculous  incident  in  his  narrative.^ 

In  fact,  what  strikes  the  student  of  mythologies  most  is  the 
poverty,  rather  than  the  richness,  of  the  primitive  imagination. 
Imagination  must  use  the  materials  of  experience  to  build  its 
creations,  however  fantastically  it  may  combine  them,  and  as  the 
range  of  experience  of  early  man  is  much  narrower  than  that  of  the 
civilized,  the  myths,  which  register  these  creations,  run  in  relatively 
narrow  grooves.  There  are  common  themes  which  one  finds 
repeated  with  almost  identical  details  in  the  most  widely  scattered 
tribes,  —  not  only  in  the  myths  of  origin  but  of  such  events  as 
wars  in  heaven  and  floods  on  earth  and  such  universal  heroes  as 
slay  dragons,  fight  giants,  and  rescue  the  weak  by  prowess  and 
miracle.  Anthropologists  formerly  sought  to  trace  these  back  to 
some  common  source  and  viewed  them  as  evidence  of  a  common 
origin  of  the  varying  cultures  which  preserved  them.  But  now 
it  is  seen  that  no  such  history  need  exist.  The  war  of  the  gods  in 
which  the  beneficent  deities  of  light  and  life  overthrow  the  dragon- 
like forces  of  evil  and  chaos  was  a  theme  native  to  many  other 
places  besides  the  Nile  and  the  Euphrates.  Myths  like  those  of 
Marduk  and  Horus  were  independent  of  each  other ;  for  the  sun- 
god  represented  the  triumph  of  order  and  settled  life,  v/hen  the 
earliest  farmers  began  to  tame  the  wastes,  drain  the  swamps  and 
plough  the  fields.  In  short,  the  history  of  the  gods  was  but  a 
reflection  of  the  activities  of  the  society  which  produced  them.  In 
this  sense  they  are  a  sort  of  perverted,  divine  reflection  of  history, 
preserving  in  a  distorting  but  vivid  medium  some  portions  of  the 
general  story  of  a  people.  "Myth  is  the  history  of  its  authors, 
not  of  its  subjects ;  it  records  the  lives,  not  of  superhuman  heroes 
but  of  poetic  nations."  ^ 

This  social  origin  and  authorship  of  myth,  while  it  does  not  pre- 

'  A  more  definite  contrast  might  be  cited  in  the  descent  of  Athene  from  Olympus 
{Iliad,  Bk.  IV,  II.  75  sqq.),  and  Milton's  description  of  Satan's  fall.  Homer's  picture 
is  based  upon  the  fall  of  stars.  "Even  as  the  son  of  Kronos  the  crooked  counsellor 
sendeth  a  star,  a  portent  for  mariners  or  a  wide  host  of  men,  bright  shining,  and  there- 
from are  scattered  sparks  in  multitude,  even  in  such  guise  sped  Pallas  Athene  to 
earth,  .  .  ."     Such  portents  furnished  the  inevitableness  of  the  simile. 

2  E.  B.  Tylor,  Primitive  Culture  (2  vols.,  3d  ed.,  1891),  Vol.  I,  p.  416. 


PREHISTORY;  MYTH  AND  LEGEND  19 

elude  the  possibility  of  individual  creations  and  modifications 
now  and  then,  enables  one  to  understand  two  things  which  other- 
wise puzzle  one  in  dealing  with  the  primitive  mind.  In  the  first 
place  that  realm  of  mystery  is  not  entirely  mysterious.  It  is  as 
much  a  part  of  nature  as  the  rest.  This  means  that  the  savage 
is  conscious  of  crossing  no  closed  barriers  as  he  turns  from  the  real 
to  the  imaginary.  In  the  second  place,  the  social  belief  in  the  tale 
brings  to  its  explanations  somewhat  the  force  of  a  suggestion  of 
nature  itself,  and  so  they  impose  themselves  upon  the  mind  with 
the  sense  of  things  final  and  inevitable. 

At  once,  this  brings  us  upon  a  fact  more  vital  for  the  history 
of  History  than  all  the  content  of  the  myths,  —  the  tendency  to 
believe.  It  is  well  to  interest  oneself  in  the  fate  of  the  gods,  but 
it  is  impious  to  inquire  too  much  of  them.  This  religious  attitude 
of  acceptance  is  largely  responsible  for  the  absurdities  which  the 
myths  contain,  since  it  is  not  fitting  to  apply  the  canons  of  common- 
sense  criticism  to  them.  But  its  significance  extends  far  beyond 
the  boundaries  of  myth  and  prehistory.  It  is  still,  in  spite  of  the 
growth  of  criticism  and  of  science,  the  ordinary  attitude  of  the 
ordinary  man.  The  first  impulse  upon  hearing  any  tale  is  to 
accept  it  as  true,^  unless  it  itself  contradicts  what  has  already  been 
believed,  or  seems  to  imply  such  a  contradiction.  Credulity  is  a 
natural  attitude  of  mind ;  criticism  is  one  of  the  most  difficult 
acquisitions  of  culture.  The  importance  of  this  fact  will  furnish 
some  of  the  main  themes  in  the  history  which  follows. 

The  credulity  of  the  primitive,  however,  has  more  excuse  than 
ours,  for  he  has  a  different  appreciation  of  fact.  We  draw  dis- 
tinctions between  the  real,  the  probable  and  the  possible,  between 
things  that  are  in  their  own  right  and  things  whose  existence  de- 
pends upon  that  of  others.  This  borderland  of  possibility  we 
place  outside  the  realm  of  fact,  not  losing  sight  of  the  condition 
upon  which  it  rests.  The  savage  stresses  the  fact  and  tends  to 
forget   the   condition.     The   unhappy   anthropologist   who   offers 

1  Dr.  Paul  Radin  has  furnished  me  with  an  unusually  interesting  instance  of  this. 
During  his  researches  among  the  Winnebagos  he  asked  a  half-breed,  who  affected  dis- 
dain for  most  of  the  Indian  beliefs,  if  he  thought  there  were  any  truth  in  a  medicine 
man's  graphic  and  detailed  story  of  his  former  incarnations.  The  puzzled  reply  was 
that  he  didn't  know  but  thought  there  might  be  something  in  it,  "for  otherwise  why 
did  the  shaman  say  so?" 


20    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

to  do  something  for  a  native  *'if  he  can"  finds  himself  regarded 
as  having  broken  his  word  if  he  does  not  fulfil  his  promise,  even  if 
the  conditions  remain  unfulfilled.  When  we  apply  such  an  attitude 
of  mind  to  problems  of  mythology  it  explains  largely  the  positive 
character  of  the  creations  of  what  we  call  the  primitive  imagination.^ 

Under  such  circumstances,  the  myth  develops  a  life  of  its  own. 
The  conditional  elements  in  it  drop  away ;  uncertainties  become 
fact  by  the  mere  force  of  statement.  Its  origins  are  lost  sight  of. 
Hera  may  once  have  been  the  air  and  Demeter  a  sheaf  of  wheat, 
but  somehow  in  the  course  of  divine  events,  by  common  human 
consent,  they  became  deities  and  lived  henceforth  the  life  divine. 
To  us  moderns  it  was  a  purely  imaginary  existence,  but  the  myth 
acquires  its  authority  upon  the  very  opposite  assumption.  And 
when  temples  are  erected  to  them,  art  and  literature  find  in  them 
their  inspiration,  when  states  trust  to  their  protection  and  individ- 
uals turn  to  them  for  salvation,  both  imagination  and  memory 
are  left  far  behind ;  the  myth  becomes  a  real  and  potent  element 
in  the  facts  of  history  and  life. 

And  yet  it  is  the  divine  or  supernatural  element  in  the  myth 
which  is  its  own  best  preservative.  Whatever  lies  within  the  sphere 
of  religion  is  protected,  the  world  over,  by  a  vast  and  unrelenting 
primitive  criminal  law,  which  we  call  the  taboo.  Everything  con- 
nected with  worship,  from  magic  to  mysticism,  is  sacred,  and  what- 
ever is  sacred  cannot  be  treated  like  ordinary  things.  It  contains 
something  of  the  power,  diabolic  or  divine,^  which  moves  by  super- 
nature  and  mystery  to  affiict  or  bless  those  who  come  in  contact 
with  it.  Sacrilege  needs  no  legal  penalties  in  societies  where 
religion  really  rules ;  it  enforces  its  own  punishment  through  the 
terrors  of  the  psychic  world.  So,  just  as  the  fetishes  and  altars 
used  in  worship  are  surcharged  with  this  sacredness  which  ensures 
their  protection,  the  myths  which  embody  the  story  of  the  gods 
are  preserved  by  their  own  religious  quality.  To  know  the  story 
of  the  god,  and  especially  to  know  his  true  name,  is  of  the  greatest 
importance  to  the  worshippers,  since  in  the  story  and  the  name 
lies  some  mysterious  suggestion  of  potency.     So  the  shaman  and 

^  The  simple-minded  novel-reader  in  the  modern  world  has  much  the  same  atti- 
tude.    The  conditions  of  the  stor>'  are  forgotten. 

*  Sacredness  is  a  general  term  and  has  the  power  to  curse  as  well  as  to  bless. 


PREHISTORY;    MYTH  AND  LEGEND  21 

his  priestly  successors,  as  those  best  fitted  to  deal  with  such  sacred 
things,  tend  to  become  the  keepers  of  the  mystic  tale  along  with 
other  objects  of  cult.  In  the  early  world  such  specialization  is 
more  or  less  informal  and  by  no  means  rigid ;  but  the  tendency 
to  intrust  the  myths  to  theological  care  is  already  evident  long 
before  the  development  of  hierarchies. 

We  are  not  interested  here  in  the  later  fate  of  the  myths  as  parts 
of  theological  systems,  for  there  they  lose  all  but  a  faint  echo  of 
their  historical  sources,  if  such  existed,  and  become  at  last  a  rather 
artificial  element  of  religions  which  grow  away  from  them,  —  as 
the  modern  world  has  grown  away  from  the  more  incongruous 
stories  of  the  Old  Testament  and  the  more  miraculous  legends  of 
the  saints  and  martyrs  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Ritual/  in  which  the 
baldest,  most  compact  statements  and  representations  are  reduced 
to  epigrammatic  and  poetic  terseness,  preserves  a  last  suggestion 
of  the  ancient  origins,  by  reason  of  its  direct  connection  with  the 
altar  and  the  rite,  —  sometimes  even  after  the  religion  in  which 
it  is  set  has  ceased  to  understand  its  meaning,  —  as  in  the  well- 
known  case  of  the  Arval  priests  at  Rome,  reciting  in  archaic  speech 
what  had  become  little  more  than  a  magical  charm  .^  And  yet, 
in  such  faint  and  unintelligible  ways,  the  traces  of  past  ages  lasted 
on,  —  less  history  for  the  worshippers  who  listened  to  the  mummery 
than  for  the  modern  historian  to  whom  they  are  no  longer  sacred 
utterances,  and  who  therefore  is  free  to  trace  their  human  origins.^ 

*  Ritual,  whether  in  word  or  act,  must  be  performed  with  absolute  accuracy. 
Any  error  is  sure  to  bring  the  wrath  of  the  gods  upon  all  concerned  and  the  vengeance 
of  society  upon  the  blunderer.  Anthropology  supplies  many  instances  of  the  inflic- 
tion of  the  severity  of  the  punishment  for  carelessness  or  mistake.  For  example, 
see  Franz  Boas,  The  Social  Organization  and  the  Secret  Societies  of  the  Kwakiutl  Indians, 
in  Anmial  Report  of  the  Board  of  Regents  of  the  Smithsonian  Institution  for  i8g5 
(published  1897). 

2  The  magical  or  priestly  formula  sometimes  repeats  the  potent  words  of  the  gods 
in  some  ancient  myth,  of  which  the  formula  is  the  only  fragment  preserved.  A  good 
example  is  given  in  A.  Erman's  Life  in  Ancient  Egypt  (tr.  1894),  p.  353.  A  charm  for 
burns  was  obviously  taken  from  a  call  of  Isis,  the  mistress  of  magic,  for  the  aid  of 
Horus :  "My  son  Horus,  it  burns  on  the  mountain,  no  water  is  there,  I  am  not  there, 
fetch  water  from  the  bank  of  the  river  to  put  out  the  fire."  In  this  connection  it 
might  be  recalled  that  the  recital  of  the  names  of  the  gods,  with  all  their  attributes, 
in  incantation  or  prayer,  involved  a  certain  amount  of  mythological  lore. 

'  The  persistence  of  even  a  mere  divine  name  may  furnish  the  clue  to  great  events; 
for  instance,  if  the  Egyptian  Re,  the  sun,  is  traceable  to  the  Semitic  root  R'a,  it  in- 


22    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

But  there  is  a  human  as  well  as  a  divine  side  to  the  myth,  and 
as  the  divine  tends  to  drop  away  or  change  except  where  embodied 
in  ritual  and  preserved  by  priests,  the  human  develops  mainly 
by  way  of  poets,  into  that  antetype  of  history,  —  the  legend.  The 
gods  still  come  and  go ;  they  hold  their  councils  as  of  old,  and  they 
seem  to  outrange  the  feeble  will  of  man ;  but  in  reality  the  human 
beings  are  the  heroes ;  upon  them  the  interest  of  the  tale  and  the 
sympathy  of  the  listener  are  concentrated,  and  even  the  gods 
dispense  with  their  divinity  wherever  the  interests  of  the  story 
demand  it. 

It  is  not  possible  definitely  to  mark  off  the  myth  from  the 
legend,  for  myths  enter  into  all  early  narratives.  And  yet  it  may 
clarify  our  survey  if  we  regard  as  legend  those  stories  which  carry 
the  human  theme  uppermost.  The  legendary,  therefore,  Hes  be- 
tween the  mythical  and  the  historical.  As  we  have  just  seen,  myth 
penetrates  it,  and  for  long  furnishes  the  dramatic  element,  the 
sudden  turns,  the  swift  surprises,  the  justice  that  tracks  the  feet 
of  crime,  the  fate  that  stands  behind  and  mocks  —  and  pulls  the 
strings.  Thus  often,  as  in  Homer,  the  legend  seems  to  be  largely  a 
repository  for  myth,  in  spite  of  all  its  worldly  interests.  Indeed 
the  poet,  far  from  being  a  bold  innovator  carrying  the  social  out- 
look frankly  away  from  the  myth,  is  really  a  conservator  of  what  is 

dicates  an  early  Semitic  invasion.  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near 
East  (2d  ed.,  1913),  p.  85.  Even  the  images  of  the  gods  may  preserve  archaic  cus- 
toms and  so  open  up  lost  pages  of  history.  The  Sumerians,  the  earliest  inhabitants 
of  lower  Babylonia  of  whom  we  have  record,  represented  their  gods  with  the  long 
hair  and  beard  of  the  Semites,  which  seems  to  indicate  a  previous  Semitic  culture, 
of  which  the  religion  at  least  persisted.  In  the  same  way  the  early  gods  of  Egypt 
are  dressed  like  the  inhabitants  of  Punt  —  Somaliland  —  which  is  taken  to  indicate 
that  the  Southern  Eg>'ptians  came  from  there.  {Ibid.,  p.  91.)  We  do  not  have  to 
go  outside  the  Jewish  and  Christian  rituals  to  see  the  persistence  of  similar  sugges- 
tions of  the  past :  the  whole  calendar  of  sacred  festivals  is  a  reminder  of  sacred 
history  (r/.  J.  T.  Shotwell,  The  Discovery  of  Time  in  The  Journal  of  Philosophy, 
Psychology,  and  Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  XII  (1915),  No.  10,  p.  253),  the  very  pre- 
scriptions as  to  the  methods  of  sacrifice,  even  the  form  of  the  temple  (see  recent 
studies  on  Orientation,  such  as  H.  Nissen's  Das  Templum  and  A.  L.  Frothingham's 
Circular  Templum  and  Mundus  in  American  Journal  of  Archceology,  Second  Series, 
Vol.  XVIII  (1914),  No.  3),  and  the  robes  and  sacrificial  implements  of  the  priests 
(see  references  in  J.  G.  Frazer's  Golden  Bough.  12  vols.,  3d  ed..  1911-1920).  Religion 
has  proved  to  be  the  greatest  reservoir  of  past  usages;  but  its  service  to  history  is 
rather  that  of  a  social  archive  than  a  social  historian. 


PREHISTORY;    MYTH  AND  LEGEND  23 

otherwise  outworn.  The  ancient  tale  acquires  in  his  eyes  a  kind  of 
sanctity  which  is  the  secular  parallel  of  its  sacredness  in  rehgion. 

In  the  naive  creations  of  the  early  epics  this  emphasis  upon  the 
gods  is  taken  for  granted ;  but  once  the  poets  start  upon  their 
proper  work  of  conscious  creation  in  the  realm  of  imagination,  their 
true  attitude  toward  myth  becomes  apparent.  There  has  been  only 
one  great  poet  of  the  uncompromising,  scientific  mind,  Lucretius. 
Even  to  our  own  day  the  mythology  of  the  world  has  survived  in 
its  poetry.  Nor  is  this  all  to  be  dismissed  as  the  play  of  pure  fancy. 
In  an  age  of  faith,  Dante  or  Milton  can  impress  their  schemes  of 
cosmology  upon  the  world  with  at  least  as  much  success  as  the 
theologians.  Even  in  Goethe's  day  the  philosophy  of  life  lost 
nothing  by  being  deliberately  expressed  along  the  lines  of  old  folk- 
myths,  and  the  cruder  imaginations  could  find  more  than  symbol 
in  the  story  of  Faust.  Poetry,  in  short,  may  have  furnished  a 
bridge  from  myth  to  history,  but  its  connection  with  the  farther 
shore  has  never  been  broken  down,  and  although  the  inquisitive 
thought  of  the  civilized  world  has  moved  across  it  to  the  conquest 
of  reality,  it  still  retains  its  ancient  character. 

Legends,  therefore,  so  long  as  they  are  preserved  by  the  poets, 
mark  but  a  single  stage  of  the  advance  toward  history.  Poetry, 
as  Thucydides  pointed  out,  is  a  most  imperfect  medium  for  fact. 
Its  ideal  is  of  another  kind.  Beauty  or  power,  emotional  stress 
and  thrill  are  its  aims,  and  to  achieve  these  it  properly  forsakes  dull, 
calculable  reality.  Its  mythical  elements  are  the  least  misleading, 
for  its  human  heroes  are  given  imaginary  roles ;  their  exploits  are 
set  in  the  world  of  romance,  and  from  of  old  the  world  of  romance 
has  been,  some  way  or  other,  the  world  of  the  unreal.  Homeric 
warriors,  for  instance,  use  the  bronze  weapons  of  an  age  already 
growing  distant  in  the  days  when  the  poems  were  recited.  Then 
the  bard  exaggerates  or  distorts  his  story  to  please  his  listeners ; 
which  means  that  each  society  in  which  it  is  recited  impresses 
changes  upon  it.  So,  although  much  of  the  early  past  has  been 
handed  down  to  us  in  epic,  in  ballad  and  in  the  poetically  turned 
legends  of  folk-lore,  these  artistic  creations  belong  rather  to  the 
history  of  literature  than  that  of  history  proper. 

And  yet  the  early  poet,  like  the  priest,  knew  the  tribal  lore.  He 
was  held  in  high  regard,  not  as  a  mere  entertainer,  like  the  travelling 


24    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

minstrel  of  a  later  day,  but  as  a  sage  who  knew  the  ways  of  gods 
to  men,  and  who  could  draw  enough  lessons  from  the  past  to  satisfy 
any  barbarously  moralizing  Ciceros  or  Carlyles.  He  may  have 
lacked  history  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word,  but  he  at  least  knew 
that  philosophy  which  teaches  by  experience.  For  the  most  im- 
portant part  of  his  tale  came  to  him  by  tradition,  in  contrast  with 
the  part  he  himself  invented.  The  first  qualification  of  the  bard 
was  rather  memory  than  imagination.  Imagination  filled  in  the 
gaps,  but  the  past  supplied  the  theme. 

Legendary  history  is  preserved  by  this  oral  tradition.  There 
is,  naturally,  no  other  way  to  preserve  it  among  pre-literate  or 
illiterate  peoples.  But  the  extent  of  it  and  its  relative  reliability 
are  a  source  of  unfailing  wonder  to  the  student  of  history.  For 
unlettered  societies,  when  left  to  themselves,  with  no  modern 
devices  to  fall  back  upon,  make  up  for  the  absence  of  reading  by 
an  almost  incredible  extension  of  the  power  of  memory.  It  is 
not  the  bard  alone  who  can  recite  his  story ;  tradition  becomes  to  a 
large  degree  a  social  heritage,  and  nothing  is  more  remarkable  than 
the  way  in  which  a  tribe  or  clan  will  repeat  its  legends,  generation 
after  generation.  Hour  after  hour,  almost  day  after  day,  the  primi- 
tive story-teller  can  recite  not  merely  the  deeds  of  gods  and  men, 
but  the  exact  words  of  the  ancient  myths.  Indeed  this  is,  perhaps, 
one  of  the  main  reasons  for  the  form  of  poetry  in  which  it  is  cast,  for 
rhythm  and  metre  swing  the  memory  along,  while  prose  seems  to 
snap  the  cord.  So  among  early  peoples,  the  whole  record  of  the  past 
tends  to  be  embodied  in  poetry — more  or  less — from  bald  lists  of 
names  in  genealogies  arranged  for  a  sing-song  chant,  to  inspiring 
epic  and  stirring  ballad.  The  role  of  memory  is  now  lessening.  We 
trust  to  books  and  put  our  memories  with  them  on  the  shelf.  But 
we  can  still  testify  to  the  acuteness  of  the  primitive  methods. 
When  we  try  to  memorize  even  a  few  names  in  a  row,  we  uncon- 
sciously fall  back  upon  the  devices  of  our  bardic  forerunners  and, 
if  we  can,  commit  them  to  memory  in  a  sing-song.^ 

When  we  turn  to  examine  the  content  of  these  early,  legendary 

^  This  is  not  advanced  as  a  general  theory  for  the  origins  of  poetry.  There  is 
virtue  in  rhythm  besides  its  aid  to  memory,  as  the  dance  sufficiently  indicates.  Ritual 
also  plays  its  role.  But  the  rhythmic  element  in  mere  prosy  lists  hints  at  its  utility 
elsewhere  as  well. 


PREHISTORY;   MYTH  AND   LEGEND  25 

traditions,  where  they  are  accessible,  we  find  them,  like  the  myths, 
perpetuating  all  kinds  of  things.  It  is  impossible  to  delay  here 
over  any  detailed  examinations  of  them.  Their  study  belongs  to 
the  field  of  folk-lore,  a  field  in  which  scientific  methods  have  made 
but  httle  progress  yet.^  But  history  may  sometimes  find  in  it  at 
least  a  general  guidance  in  matters  otherwise  unrecoverable.  The 
incidental  mention  of  natural  objects  helps  to  throw  light  upon  the 
character  of  the  civilization  which  produced  the  legend.  For 
instance,  the  tales  of  early  Rome  point  to  a  farming  community. 
In  like  manner,  the  very  absence  of  mention  is  sometimes  just  as 
significant.  None  of  these  same  early  Roman  legends  points  to 
the  sea.  The  story  of  ^Eneas'  wanderings  came  in  after  Greek 
civilization  had  penetrated  Italy.  It  was  obviously  manufactured 
after  the  Romans  knew  about  Greece  and  appreciated  Homer 
enough  to  wish  to  trace  their  ancestry  to  the  fields  of  Troy.  We 
know  that  this  was  the  case  because  there  are  no  primitive  tradi- 
tions that  correspond  with  it.  It  was  invented  to  suit  the  occasion 
by  men  of  a  later  age.^ 

1  At  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  Herder  pointed  out  the  importance  of 
folk-lore  in  the  crude,  natural  poetry  preserved  by  historic  peoples  down  to  the  pres- 
ent. The  work  of  the  brothers  Grimm  and  of  the  whole  romanticist  movement  greatly 
enriched  this  popular  literature.  But  the  romanticists  overburdened  it  with  the 
trappings  of  their  imagination  and  made  it  unreal  either  as  representing  primitive  or 
modern  ideas.  Historical  criticism,  which  had  seen  the  legends  of  Homer  and  regal 
Rome  destroyed,  was,  therefore,  unwilling  to  grant  even  proper  recognition  to  folk- 
lore as  a  serious  occupation.  Finally  at  the  opening  of  the  twentieth  century,  the 
comparative  method,  rescued  in  turn  from  its  cruder  uses,  has  enabled  the  historian 
to  proceed  upon  cautious  and  promising  principles  for  the  appraisal  of  the  value  of 
traditions. 

2  See  Jesse  B.  Carter,  The  Religion  of  Numa  (1906),  and  the  masterly  use  of 
religious  data  for  historical  purposes  by  W.  W.  Fowler  in  his  Religious  Experience 
of  the  Roman  People  (191 1) ;  or,  for  further  research,  the  work  of  G.  Wissowa,  Religion 
und  Ktdtiis  der  Romer  (2d  ed.,  1912). 

The  myths  of  the  historic  nations,  especially  those  of  Greece  and  Rome,  and  to 
a  less  extent  of  the  north  of  Europe,  have  been  published  in  such  a  variety  of  forms 
and  have  entered  into  literature  to  such  an  extent  as  to  make  any  short  bibliography 
of  the  field  wellnigh  impossible.  From  T.  Bulfinch's  Age  of  Fable  (rev.  and  enl.  ed., 
1919),  for  children,  to  such  works  as  R.  Reitzenstcin's  Hcllenistische  Wundercrzdhlungen 
(1906),  which  is  for  the  most  advanced  scholar,  through  Handbilcher  and  dictionaries 
of  classical  antiquities,  the  student  may  pass  a  busy  life  in  merely  keeping  up  with 
the  available  works  dealing  with  the  subject.  One  thing  only  need  be  said  here ; 
and  that  is  that  since  the  comparative  method  was  first  applied,  by  Max  Miiller, 
to  the  elucidation  of  the  myths  of  Greece  and  Rome,  —  basing  it  upon  philology 


26    INTRODUCTION   TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

There  are,  therefore,  two  main  types  of  legends :  the  folk-tale 
that  no  one  made,  that  was  born  in  no  one  brain,  but,  like  Topsy  in 
Uncle  Tonics  Cabin,  met  a  social  demand,  ready-made ;  and  the 
false  legend  invented  long  after  the  events  with  which  it  deals,  a 
romance  produced  to  glorify  a  monarch,  a  nation  or  a  noble  house, 
like  the  genealogies  that  reached  back  to  the  gods  and  so  flattered 
their  happy  recipient  with  divine  ancestry.  The  difficulty  of 
deciding  which  kind  one  is  dealing  with,  whether  it  is  primitive  or 
artificial,  makes  the  task  of  the  scholar  an  extremely  delicate  and 
treacherous  one.  For  even  the  genuine  folk-tales  come  to  us  worked 
over  by  successive  generations  until  often  so  obscured  that  with  the 
combined  resources  of  archaeology,  anthropology  and  history  one 
can  but  guess  at  their  value  and  true  meaning.^ 

Looking  over  the  field  of  myth  and  legend  as  a  whole,  we  see 
that  we  are  everywhere  outside  the  boundary  of  genuine  history. 
History  may  incorporate  portions  of  their  substance,  but  it  differs 
from  them  in  both  means  and  end.  It  is  not  a  thing  of  poetry  but 
of  prose;    it  needs  sobriety  and  commonplaceness  of  expression, 

on  the  one  hand  for  the  names  of  the  gods  and  upon  natural  phenomena,  sky,  sun, 
earth,  etc.,  for  their  origin,  —  the  study  has  made  long  progress.  The  anthropolog- 
ical archaeologists  forcibly  invaded  the  field  in  the  twentieth  century,  and  although 
their  first  attempts  at  interpreting  were  somewhat  too  confident  and  a  bit  careless, 
they  have  made  over  almost  our  whole  conception  of  the  religious  outlook  of  the 
antique  world.  Sober  surveys  of  this  work  may  be  found  in  L.  R.  Farnell's  Cults 
of  the  Greek  States  (5  vols.,  1896-1909),  and  in  W.  W.  Fowler's  Religious  Experience  of 
the  Roman  People,  while  such  works  as  those  of  Gilbert  Murray,  especially  his  Rise  of 
the  Greek  Epic  (1907),  connect  it  with  a  genuine  historical  interest.  The  Egyptian 
myths,  which  fill  so  large  a  space  in  the  works  of  Erman,  Maspero  or  Budge,  have 
been  reexamined  in  a  most  illuminating  survey  by  J.  H.  Breasted,  in  his  Develop- 
ment of  Religion  and  Thought  in  Ancient  Egypt  (1912).  For  Babylonia-Assyria,  we 
have  the  works  of  R.  W.  Rogers,  and  those  of  Morris  Jastrow,  not  to  mention  the 
output  of  European  scholars,  among  whom  L.  W.  King's  contribution  in  supplying 
texts  with  English  translation  should  be  noted.     Vide  infra,  Chaps.  V  and  VI. 

^  A  good  example  is  the  Horus  myth  of  Egypt,  which  represents  this  Nubian 
sky-god  leading  his  army  of  metal-workers,  with  their  metal-tipped  spears,  to  the 
conquest  of  his  rival  Set  and  the  land  of  Egypt.  The  story  as  we  have  it  comes  from 
the  latest  period  of  Egyptian  history,  and  is  interwoven  with  details  from  the  war  of 
the  Horus-born  pharaohs  against  the  Hyksos  in  historical  times,  although  many  cen- 
turies before  the  myth  was  cast  in  the  form  in  which  we  have  it.  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The 
Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East,  pp.  91  sq.;  J.  H.  Breasted,  Development  of  Religion 
and  Thought  in  Ancient  Egypt,  p.  38. 


PREHISTORY;    MYTH  AND   LEGEND  27 

just  as  it  needs  rigid  outlines,  if  the  fancy  which  runs  wild  in  legend 
is  to  be  checked  and  the  narrative  made  worthy  of  the  credence  of 
inquiring  men.  Then,  that  narrative  must  be  intrusted  to  some- 
thing more  reliable  than  memory  —  even  social  memory  at  its  best. 
And  finally  it  must  be  kept  definite  in  outline  and  positive  in  dates. 
So  history  must  pass  by  way  of  written  records  out  of  the  realm 
of  taboo  and  folk-lore,  which  priests  and  poets  perpetuate.  The 
vague  or  rambling  tradition  must  become  a  straightforward  narra- 
tive, taking  into  account  the  steadily  passing  years.  There  are, 
therefore,  outside  of  myth  and  epic,  two  indispensable  bases  for 
history :  writing  and  mathematics,  —  the  one  to  record  what  time 
would  otherwise  indifferently  blot  out,  the  other  to  measure  time 
itself  in  calendars  and  chronology. 


CHAPTER  III 
BOOKS  AND   WRITING 

Writing  ranks  next  to  speech  itself  as  the  implement  and  em- 
bodiment of  thought.  Yet  its  evolution  has  been  exceedingly 
slow  and  is  still  most  imperfect.  Even  today,  if  we  take  the 
world  as  a  whole,  the  great  majority  of  men  and  women  must  learn 
by  word  of  mouth  alone  whatever  they  are  to  know,  since  the 
magic  of  the  alphabet  and  of  its  combinations  on  the  printed  page 
is  still  beyond  their  grasp.  Yet  the  Australian  blacks,  the  lowest  of 
existing  mankind,  can  read  crude  markings  on  twigs  made  by 
distant  tribes  ;  ^  the  Bushmen  of  South  Africa  —  low  grade  among 
the  Africans  —  can  draw  their  pictures  of  the  hunt  almost  to  match 
the  hieroglyphs  of  Egypt.-  From  message  sticks  to  picture- 
writing  the  gulf  seems  wide,  and  the  next  step,  —  from  picture- 
writing  to  an  alphabet  —  seems  small  in  comparison.  But  on  the 
contrary,  while  the  cave-dwellers  of  Europe,  ten  to  twenty  thousand 
years  ago,  could  draw  the  bison  and  the  reindeer  with  a  skill  to  match 
the  artist  of  today,  such  simple  things  as  letters  are  the  invention 
of  those  comparatively  recent  times  when  merchant  ships  from 
Tyre  and  Sidon  were  already  exploiting  the  markets  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean. As  for  the  extensive  use  of  writing,  in  literature,  records 
or  journaHsm,  it  occupied  no  such  place  in  the  cultures  of  antiquity 
—  even  of  Greece  at  its  best  —  as  it  does  today. 

One  reason  for  this  is  obvious  —  the  lack  of  paper.  We  have 
been  taught  in  our  history  manuals  the  revolutionary  effects  of 
the  invention  of  the  printing  press  upon  the  history  of  western 
thought,  but  paper  is  just  as  important  as  the  press.  Imagine 
what  it  would  be  like  if  our  libraries  were  stacked  with  chiselled 
slabs  of  stone  or  tablets  of  baked  clay,  if  our  newspapers  were  sun- 

^  Cf.  A.  W.  Howitt,  Notes  on  Australian  Message  Slicks  and  Messengers,  in  The 
Joimial  of  the  Archaological  Institute  of  Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  Vol.  XVIII  (1889), 
PP-  314-332. 

2  Cf.  C.  Menhof,  Zur  Entstehung  der  Schrift  in  Zeitschrift  fiir  agyptlsche  Sprache 
^nd  Altertumskunde,  Vol.  XLIX  (191 1),  pp.  i  sq. 

28 


BOOKS  AND   WRITING  29 

dried  bricks.  When  papyrus,  the  paper  of  the  ancient  world,  came 
to  be  used  in  Egypt,  the  writing  changed,  lost  its  slow,  old  pictures 
and  became  much  like  ours ;  and  instead  of  a  few  walls  or  stelae 
covered  with  hieroglyphs,  there  were  libraries  filled  with  manu- 
scripts. Stone,  as  a  medium  for  writing,  has  a  double  disadvan- 
tage ;  it  is  not  only  hard  to  manipulate,  it  is  practically  immovable. 
One  has  to  go  to  it  to  read.  The  inscription  is  part  of  a  monument 
instead  of  a  thing  in  itself,  like  the  writing  on  a  piece  of  papyrus. 
Babylonia  never  suffered  from  this  handicap  as  Egypt  did;  owing 
to  lack  of  stone  it  wrote  on  clay,  inferior  to  papyrus  but  usable. 
It  is  hard  to  draw  pictures  or  to  write  with  a  round  hand  on  clay, 
so  the  Babylonian  bricks  and  cylinders  were  scratched  with  straight 
little  wedge-like  marks.  And  the  weight  of  brick  or  cylinder  was 
such  as  to  force  the  scribe  to  write  with  almost  microscopic  fineness. 

It  takes  but  a  moment's  thought  to  realize  how  the  medium 
for  preserving  literature  conditions  its  scope,  and  its  place  in  society. 
What  is  written  depends  in  a  great  degree  upon  what  it  is  written 
on.  It  is  well,  therefore,  before  surveying  the  early  records  of 
history,  to  examine  hurriedly  the  manner  and  method  of  the  com- 
position, —  the  more  so,  as  historiography  seldom  deigns  to  cast 
its  eye  on  so  purely  material  a  basis  for  its  existence.^ 

Stone  and  clay,  the  first  two  media  of  Egypt  and  Babylonia, 
were,  as  we  have  seen,  definitely  limited  in  their  possibilities. 
There  was  need  of  a  lighter,  thinner  substance,  suitable  for  carrying 
around,  yet  strong  enough  not  to  break  easily  with  general  use.' 
Egypt  ultimately  had  recourse  to  the  use  of  papyrus.  Babylonia 
more  to  that  of  leather.  But  there  was  a  primitive  substitute  for 
both  of  these  which  we  must  not  forget.  Leaves  of  trees  sometimes 
furnish  such  a  medium  in  tropical  countries,  particularly  the  tough- 
fibred   palm-leaf,   of   use   especially   in   India.     The   hieroglyphs 

1  The  literature  on  this  interestint^  background  of  history  is  not  extensive,  and 
mainly  goes  back  to  the  capital  work  of  T.  Birt,  Das  anlike  Buchwesen  (1882). 

See  also  K.  Dziatzko,  Untersuchungen  iiber  ausgewdhlte  Kapilel  des  anliken  Biich- 
wesens  (1900),  and  other  references  below. 

*  The  distinction  between  the  hard,  heavy  media  for  inscriptions  and  the  lighter 
kind,  furnishes  the  basis  of  a  distinction  between  epigraphy  and  palaeography,  the 
former  dealing  with  monumental  writing,  the  latter  with  writing  in  its  more  general 
forms.  Epigraphy  properly  belongs  with  archaeology ;  palaeography,  however,  carry- 
ing the  history  of  writing  parallel  with  successive  epochs  of  culture,  is  a  constant  aid 
to  history. 


30      INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

preserve  traces  of  its  use  in  Egypt  as  well.^  In  temperate  climates 
where  even  this  fragile  writing  surface  is  not  at  hand,  wood  fur- 
nished the  commonest  substitute.  Our  barbarian  ancestors  in 
northern  Europe,  improving  a  little  on  the  twigs,  which  the 
earliest  savages  notched  for  messages  or  memoranda,  inscribed 
their  runic  markings  on  rudely  cut  branches  of  trees.^ 

A  new  era  in  literature  was  made  possible  with  the  use  of  the 
metalhc  saw.  When  boards  became  common,  they  offered  a  good 
and  ready  medium,  and  were  in  general  use  throughout  the  antique 
world,  wherever  lumber  was  plentiful.  Small,  square  or  oblong 
boards  were  especially  in  demand  as  tablets  for  note-taking  or 
memoranda ;  as  such  they  were  used  by  school  children  far  back 
in  ancient  Egypt.^  But,  although  also  serving  at  times  for  record- 
ing Hterature,  they  were  more  generally  used  in  Greece  and  Rome 
for  matters  of  business  and  for  correspondence,  being  lighter  and 
cheaper  than  lead  or  other  metalHc  tablets,  —  which  were  also 
used,  —  and  cheaper  than  leather.  In  such  cases  it  was  customary 
to  fold  two  tablets  together,^  and  the  interior  cover  was  commonly 
covered  with  wax.  Boards  were  also  used,  however,  for  formal 
inscriptions,  the  most  famous  being  the  white  tablet,  known  as  the 
album,  upon  which  the  Pontifex  Maximas  inscribed  the  events  of 
the  year  and  which  was  displayed  at  the  Regia,  —  the  origin  of  the 

^  A  good  example  is  the  scene  of  the  gods  writing  the  name  of  Ramses  II  on  the 
leaves  of  a  sacred  tree,  in  R.  Lepsius,  Denkmdler  aus  Acgypten  und  Aethiopien  (12 
vols.,  1849-1859),  Sect.  Ill,  Vol.  VI,  Plate  169,  and  A.  Erman,  Life  in  Ancient  Egypt 
(tr.  1894),  p.  347- 

2  Cf.  Venantius  Fortunatus  {Opera  Omnia,  Part  I,  Bk.  VII,  Chap.  XVIII),  who 
wrote  at  the  end  of  the  sixth  century : 

Barbara  f raxineis  pingatur,  runa  tabellis 
Quodque  papyrus  agit,  virgula  plana  valet. 

On  the  other  hand,  runic  characters  have  now  been  found  inscribed  on  various 
substances,  stone  and  metal. 

'  Cj.  K.  Dziatzko,  Untersiichungen  iiber  atisgewdhltc  Kapitel  des  aniiken  Buchwesens , 
pp.  6,  19,  23.  The  Greeks,  as  well  as  the  Romans,  used  them  almost  exclusively  in 
the  earlier  days. 

■*  These  tablets  were  also  sometimes  of  lead  or  other  metals.  The  two  folded 
together  were  kno\\Ti  as  the  diptych.  Often  it  was  ornamented  on  the  outer  covers. 
Used  widely  for  correspondence,  diptychs  were  also  sent  around  by  consuls  and  other 
officials  upon  assuming  office,  to  appraise  their  friends  of  the  dignity  and  title.  The 
Christian  church,  adopting  this  use,  kept  diptychs  with  the  names  of  clergy,  saints, 
and  martyrs  at  their  altars.  The  relation  of  these  with  mediaeval  annals  is  of  much 
interest  in  this  connection. 


BOOKS  AND  WRITING  31 

official  annals  of  Rome.  In  early  Greece  they  were  used  to  write 
down  the  works  of  the  poets,  which  a  still  earlier  age  had  committed 
to  memory.  Tradition  has  it  that  Greek  tyrants,  —  presumably 
copying  the  example  of  the  library  of  Ashur-bani-pal  of  the  seventh 
century,  —  gathered  libraries  and  employed  scholars  to  edit  the 
classical  texts.  But  the  scholarly  activity  could  not  achieve  much 
when  it  would  require  two  hundred  wooden  tablets  to  arrange 
and  handle  the  two  Homeric  epics .^  It  is  clear  that  wood,  like 
stone  or  brick,  serves  only  for  the  preliminary  and  casual  phases 
of  the  history  of  writing.^ 

It  is  doubtful  if  the  antique  world  could  have  developed  the 
classical  literatures  in  all  their  variety  and  freedom  of  scope,  had 
there  been  nothing  better  to  write  upon.  Two  substances  saved  the 
situation,  papyrus  and  leather.  Of  these  two,  the  latter  played 
little  part  in  the  Mediterranean  world  during  classical  antiquity. 
In  the  Orient,  leather  was  always  in  use,  and  in  the  fourth  cen- 
tury of  the  Christian  era  that  form  of  it  known  as  parchment 
superseded  everything  else.  But  the  paper  of  Greek  and  Roman 
times  was  papyrus. 

As  far  back  as  the  middle  of  the  fourth  millennium  B.C.,  Egyptians 
knew  how  to  cut  through  the  stem  of  the  papyrus  reed,  and,  pasting 
two  thin  slips  of  its  stringy  marrow  back-to-back,  cross-ways  on, 
secured  a  tough  and  satisfactory  writing  surface.  As  we  have 
already  pointed  out,  the  scribe  could  write  upon  it  with  a  flowing 
hand,  which  eliminated  much  of  the  toilsome  picture-writing  of  the 
genuine  hieroglyph  upon  the  stone.  But  yet,  so  impressive  were 
the  monumental  inscriptions,  so  rigid  the  strength  of  Egyptian 
traditions,  that  the  home  of  the  papyrus  did  not  produce  that  last 
essential  to  writing  —  the  alphabet. 

By  the  twelfth  century  B.C.,  the  business  men  of  the  market 
ports  of  Phoenicia,  keen-witted  as  their  Hellenic  neighbors  of  a 
later  day,  seem  to  have  realized  the  usefulness  of  Egyptian  papyrus, 
as  Egyptian  records  show  that  they  imported  it  to  their  cities  at 

^Cf.  K.  Dziatzko,  op.  cit.,  p.  26. 

2  If  we  rely  upon  etymology,  the  Romans,  like  some  semi-barbarous  people,  once 
used  the  inner  bark  of  the  tree  to  write  upon,  for  that  is  the  meaning  of  their  word 
for  "book,"  liher.  The  word  book  itself,  with  its  several  Teutonic  variants,  comes 
from  the  same  root  as  that  of  the  beech  tree. 


32    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

least  as  early  as  the  middle  of  that  century.^  No  one  can  say 
whether  it  was  this  importation  of  papyrus  which  helped  them 
to  invent  the  alphabet  or  whether  the  invention  of  the  alphabet 
brought  the  trade  in  papyrus ;  but,  in  any  case,  these  two  events, 
so  important  for  the  future  —  and  the  past  —  of  the  world's  culture, 
were  interrelated. 

The  use  of  papyrus  elsewhere  seems  to  have  spread  relatively 
.slowly.  In  western  Asia  it  did  not  displace  the  widespread  use  of 
leather  to  any  great  extent.  The  Hebrew  scriptures,  for  instance, 
were  written  on  rolls  of  leather,  not  papyrus.  The  Greeks,  too, 
were  surprisingly  slow  to  adopt  it.  Already  by  the  middle  of  the 
sixth  century  B.C.,  they  were  familiar  with  the  material,  which  they 
named  "biblos"  {/3vl3Xo'i)  from  the  Phoenician  city  which  traded 
in  it.  Herodotus,  however,  in  the  fifth  century,  describes  the 
papyrus  growing  in  Egypt  without  mentioning  its  use  as  paper, 
and  so  has  left  an  open  conjecture  as  to  what  he  had  in  mind  when 
he  referred  to  /Sv^Xof.'^  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  Greeks  were 
always  hampered  by  the  scarcity  of  papyrus,  which  they  had  to 
import.  This  partly  accounts  for  the  extent  to  which  their  litera- 
ture was  cast  in  form  for  oral  delivery  rather  than  private  reading,  — 
as  is  seen  even  in  the  philosophical  treatises,  arranged  in  the 
shape  of  dialogues.  There  was  apparently  no  great  library  at 
Athens,  even  under  Pericles.  The  first  public  library  in  that  city 
was  not  erected  until  the  reign  of  Hadrian.'^  It  was  in  the  land 
of  the  papyrus  itself  that  the  first  great  Greek  library  flourished. 
The  date  of  the  founding  of  the  hbraries  of  Alexandria  is  not  quite 
certain,  but  the  first  was  probably  founded  by  Ptolemy  I  early 
in  the  third  century  b.c.^ 

1  Cf.  J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt  (s  vols.,  1Q06-1907),  Vol.  IV,  p.  284. 
It  seems  likely  that  they  also  manufactured  a  paper  from  other  reeds,  perhaps 
from  some  grown  nearer  home.     This  may  explain  the  treatment  by  Herodotus. 

2  From  Biblos  comes  our  word  Bible.  The  paper  itself,  before  it  was  written 
upon,  was  called  xapr?;?  or  charta,  which  also  suggests  a  changed  history.  A  length  of 
papyrus  was  termed  t6^ios  or  tomus,  from  the  fact  that  it  was  "  cut  off,"  or,  in  Latin, 
a  volumen,  from  the  fact  that  it  was  wound  up.  The  Latin  word  liber  refers  to  the 
whole  book  and  is  identical  with  volumen.     Cf.  T.  Birt,  op.  cit..  Chap.  I. 

»C/.  Pausanias,  Attica,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XVIII,  Sect.  9;  J.  W.  Clark,  The  Care  of 
Books  (2d  ed.,  1909),  p.  6. 

*  There  were  two :  one  apparently  connected  with  the  palace ;  the  other  with  the 
temple  of  Serapis.    The  chief  benefactions  are  attributed  to  the  son,  Ptolemy  II. 


BOOKS  AND  WRITING  33 

The  influence  of  these  Kbraries  of  Alexandria,  and  of  their  Kbra- 
rians,  upon  the  literature  and  thought  of  antiquity  was  very  great. 
Even  the  seemingly  trivial  needs  of  the  shelf-room  classification 
had  most  important  results ;  for,  in  order  to  arrange  their  writings 
readily,  they  cut  them  up.^  The  average  strip  of  papyrus  which 
could  be  easily  filed  away  and  in  which  one  could  readily  find  ref- 
erences, was  from  twenty  to  thirty  feet  long.  The  parchment 
roll  was  therefore  cut  off  to  about  this  length.  Since  the  older 
authors,  those  prior  to  the  age  of  Alexandrian  savants,  had  not 
composed  their  works  with  reference  to  any  such  bibliographical 
needs,  the  scholars  deftly  divided  them  into  sections,  "tomes"  or 
books,  to  suit  their  needs.  So  the  text  of  Herodotus  was  divided 
into  nine  sections,  each  set  apart  under  the  symbol  of  a  Muse. 
Thucydides'  history  was  similarly  broken  up  into  eight  books. 
The  purely  bibliographical  character  of  such  a  device  comes  out 
even  more  clearly  in  the  use  of  letters  of  the  alphabet  for  the  divi- 
sions of  Homer  and  Aristotle.  After  the  scholars  had  thus  recast 
the  literature  already  written,  the  authors  of  more  recent  antiquity 
wrote  with  an  eye  to  dividing  their  own  texts  so  that  the  rolls  would 
be  of  proper  length  and  the  pigeon-holes  on  the  library  walls  would 
easily  take  them  in.  In  this  way  the  expedients  of  the  ancient 
librarians  affected  the  classics. 

All  the  antique,  classical  literature  was  produced  under  these 
conditions.  Yet,  until  the  recent  discoveries  of  archaeology,  not 
a  classical  text  has  reached  us  in  its  original  form  of  papyrus  roll. 
In  fact  papyrus  itself  disappears  from  common  use,  and  its  place  is 
taken  by  parchment.-  The  reason  for  this  is  not  altogether  clear. 
There  was  a  decline  in  the  output  of  the  papyrus  plant  itself,  and 
then  it  disappeared  from  the  Nile  delta  altogether;    but  whether 

1  The  standard  work  on  this  whole  subject  of  ancient  books  is  T.  Birt,  Das  antike 
Biichwesen.  See  also  E.  Maunde  Thompson,  An  Inlroduction  lo  Creek  and  Latin  Palcc- 
ography  (rev.  ed.,  191 2),  or  F.  W.  Hall,  A  Companion  lo  Classical  Texts  (1913)  for  good 
short  accounts.  There  is  a  good  account  of  libraries  in  J.  W.  Clark,  Tlie  Care  of 
Books. 

2  Papyrus  paper  was  still  used  to  some  extent  through  the  first  part  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  For  instance,  it  was  used  at  the  papal  court  until  the  eleventh  century.  But 
parchment  was  much  more  durable.  The  ancients  regarded  a  papyrus  two  or  three 
centuries  old  as  rare.  Cf.  K.  Dziatzko,  art.  Buck,  col.  939  sqq..  Vol.  Ill,  in  Pauly- 
Wissowa,  Real  Encyclopadie  der  classischcn  Allerlumswisscnschajl  (1894-1918). 


34    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

this  was  due  to  the  fact  that  papyrus  culture  and  trade  were  under 
strict  government  control,  —  which  in  the  later  empire  meant 
robbing  the  future  to  pay  the  present,  —  or  whether  the  book  trade 
was  ruined  —  and  hence  papyrus  culture  —  by  a  decline  in  the 
demand  from  readers,  the  fact  remains  that  from  the  fourth  century 
of  our  era  the  papyrus  roll  was  replaced  by  an  entirely  different 
form  of  book,  the  parchment  codex. 

The  name  parchment  comes  from  the  city  of  Pergamum,  on 
the  coast  of  Asia  Minor.  There,  in  the  second  century  B.C.,  a 
Greek  tyrant,  Eumenes  II  (197-159),  made  his  capital  of  a  state 
that  had  been  built  out  of  the  Macedonian  Empire.  On  the  crest 
of  a  lofty  hill,  dominating  the  city,  he  placed  a  palace,  a  temple, 
and  a  library  that  was  one  of  the  wonders  of  the  world.^  Legend 
had  it,  recorded  by  the  antiquarian  Varro,^  that  the  rival  tyrant 
in  Egypt,  Ptolemy  VI,  refused  to  send  papyrus  and  that,  as  a 
substitute,  Eumenes  invented  parchment.  The  story,  though  still 
frequently  quoted,  does  not  hold ;  for  the  use  of  leather  as  writing 
material  is  as  old  as  that  of  papyrus,  or  older;  it  was  common 
throughout  Asia,  and  was  referred  to  already  by  Herodotus.  But 
the  name  of  Pergamum,  attached  to  the  sheets  of  leather  {pergamena 
cliarta)  seems  to  indicate  a  new  process  of  tanning  and  preparation, 
and  a  centre  of  the  trade  at  Pergamum. 

For  some  five  hundred  years  after  the  founding  of  the  Pergamum 
library,  papyrus  still  remained  the  common  medium  of  writing. 
Finally,  however,  as  we  have  seen,  in  the  fourth  century  of  our  era, 
it  was  superseded  by  the  parchment,  no  longer  wound  into  long  rolls, 
but  cut  like  the  leaves  of  a  book  and  fastened  together  in  somewhat 
the  same  form  as  the  tablets  of  wood  had  been,  in  what  was  called 
a  codex.3  Into  these  codices  the  works  of  antiquity  were  transcribed 
from  the  worn  papyrus  rolls  by  Christian  scribes.  What  was  not 
so  transcribed  was  lost ;  for,  as  we  have  said  above,  no  papyrus  text 
survived.  The  fate  of  the  classical  literatures,  and  of  much  history, 
depended  upon  the  smaller  pages  of  the  new  form  of  book. 

»  Cf.  J.  W.  Clark,  The  Care  of  Books,  pp.  8  sqq. 

2  CJ.  Pliny,  Naiuralis  Eistoriae  Libri  XXXVII,  Bk.  XIII,  Chap.  XI.  Jerome 
repeats  the  story,  with  slight  variation,  Ep.  VII  ad  Chromatium.  Cf.  T.  Birt,  op.  cit., 
pp.  50  sqq. 

'  The  word  caudex  or  codex  first  meant  the  tree  trunk. 


BOOKS  AND  WRITING  35 

The  ease  with  which  the  vellum  or  parchment  could  be  washed 
or  scraped  to  clean  off  its  past  writing  and  the  surface  used  again 
for  more  pressing  needs,  recommended  it  especially  to  the  mediaeval 
scribes,  since  writing  materials  were  so  very  scarce.  Such  palimp- 
sests ^  still  bore  traces  of  their  former  use,  and  in  this  manner  the 
half-obliterated  original  was  often  preserved,  when  a  feebler  texture 
like  papyrus  would  not  have  retained  it.  The  papyrus  leaves  could 
be  cleaned  by  a  sponge,  but  were  not  strong  enough  to  be  used  a 
second  time  for  lasting  documents.  The  practice  of  scraping  the 
wax  tables  is  also  referred  to  by  Cicero,  and  must  have  been  common, 
whatever  the  material  used,  so  long  as  it  was  difficult  to  procure. 
The  mediaeval  palimpsests  show  by  the  fragmentary  character  of 
the  original  texts  they  preserve  that  "the  scribes  were  indiscrimi- 
nate in  supplying  themselves  with  material  from  any  old  volumes 
that  happened  to  be  at  hand."  ^  Fragmentary  as  they  are,  however, 
these  old  texts,  treated  chemically  and  read  critically  by  modern 
scholars,  have  restored  many  a  precious  passage  of  the  lost  literatures 
of  antiquity.  It  is  one  of  the  ironies  of  history  that  books  of  devo- 
tion, used  for  centuries  in  the  service  of  the  Church  which  denounced 
the  vanities  of  pagan  thought  and  practice,  should  keep  for  the 
modern  humanist  those  very  texts  of  myth  or  history  which  other- 
wise would  have  passed  into  complete  oblivion. 

The  use  of  the  codex  lasted  through  the  Middle  Ages,  and  gave 
the  suggestion  for  the  modern  book.  Fortunately,  during  the 
century  preceding  the  invention  of  printing  by  movable  types, 
another  substance  began  to  be  sufficiently  common  to  cope  with 
the  increasing  demand  for  writing  materials.  Paper  is  originally 
a  Chinese  invention,  but  was  brought  into  Europe  through  the 
Mohammedan  cultures  of  the  Near  East  and  Spain.  As  early  as 
the  twelfth  century,  sheets  of  it  drifted  into  Christendom,  through 
those  two  open  doors,  the  Moorish  and  Italian  trade,  but  it  was 
not  until  the  later  part  of  the  fourteenth  century  that  paper  became 
the  general  medium  for  writing.  It  still  remained  comparatively 
rare  —  and  generally  good  —  until  the  invention  of  a  machine 
at  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  enabled  manufacturers  to 
make  more  than  a  sheet  at  a  time,  —  which  is  the  way  with  the  old 

1  From  the  Greek  irdXiv,  again,  and  xf'du,  scrape. 

2  Article  Palimpsest  in  Encyclopccdia  Britannica  (by  E.  Maunde  Thompson). 


36    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY   OF  HISTORY 

hand  process,  still  in  use  in  rare  papers,  bank  notes  and  the  like. 
But  with  the  vast  and  rapid  increase  in  the  output  of  paper  in  our 
own  day  comes  an  attendant  danger  to  contemporary  history,  of 
which  historians  and  librarians  have  warned  repeatedly  in  vain. 
For  the  paper  made  today  is  the  most  fragile  stuff  upon  which 
any  civilization  has  ever  intrusted  the  keeping  of  its  records.  All 
but  a  tiny  fraction  of  the  vast  output  of  our  printing  presses  is 
crumbling  and  discolored  waste  a  few  years  after  it  is  printed  upon. 
We  are  writing  not  upon  sand  but  upon  dust-heaps.  The  thought 
is  a  sobering  one  to  any  one  who  looks  back,  even  in  so  short  and 
superficial  a  survey  as  this,  over  the  fate  of  other  civilizations  and 
the  slight  and  fragmentary  traces  they  have  left. 

We  have  mentioned,  in  passing,  that  the  form  of  writing  has 
to  some  extent  depended  upon  the  materials  used.  But  writing 
has  a  history  of  its  own,  a  history  of  so  great  importance  to  the 
historian  that  the  study  of  the  history  of  handwriting  is  a  science 
in  itself,  palaeography.^  Even  after  the  alphabet  supplants  hiero- 
glyphics, and  so  becomes  the  mere  barren  framework  of  words,  its 
style  changes  with  different  cultures,  and  only  those  can  read  it 
who  have  made  it  a  special  study.  For  it  requires  constant  famil- 
iarity with  the  crabbed  and  compressed  text,  with  the  forms  of 
abbreviations  and  devices  for  shortening  the  interminable  labor 
of  transcription,  to  decipher  the  ancient  manuscripts.  Into  this 
field,  fundamental  as  it  is  to  historical  research,  it  is  impossible 
to  enter  here.  Fortunately  the  student  of  history  today  is  able 
to  travel  far  toward  his  goal,  even  in  mediaeval  and  ancient  history, 
without  having  to  decipher  manuscripts  for  himself.  For,  especially 
during  the  last  hundred  years,  generations  of  scholars  have  been 
at  work  preparing  the  texts,  and  others  have  been  equally  busy 
criticising  them,  so  that  the  day  is  almost  past  when  the  historian 
has  to  make  his  pilgrimage  from  archive  to  archive  to  compare 
and  copy  the  major  texts  of  his  sources,  and  so  be  his  own  palae- 
ographer. The  discipline  involved  is  one  which  may  always  be 
indulged  in  to  advantage,  but  the  results  to  be  obtained  are  grow- 
ing steadily  less,  as  the  great  collections  of  sources,  edited  by  the 
most  eminent  of  scholars,  fiU  up  the  shelves  of  our  libraries  at  home. 

'  From  TTttXaiij,  old,  and  ypd<t>eiv,  to  write. 


BOOKS  AND  WRITING  37 

All  writing  is  in  a  sense  historical,  in  that  its  purpose  is  to  record 
something.  So  far  we  have  been  treating  it  almost  as  though  it 
were  an  end  in  itself,  but  it  is  only  a  means  for  doing  something 
else,  such  as  stimulating  thought  or  action.  When  we  turn  from 
the  means  to  the  end,  we  are  brought  face  to  face  with  the  origins 
of  history. 

The  earliest  markings  were  largely  aids  to  memory,  such  as  are 
in  use  throughout  the  savage  world,  —  scratches  on  sticks  or  leaves 
or  bark  of  trees,  runic  signs,  wampum  belts,  ensuring  that  both 
parties  to  an  agreement  remember  alike,  spreading  news  or  record- 
ing it.  One  of  the  most  important  of  such  devices  is  the  indication 
of  rights  of  property  by  symbols  denoting  ownership.  Thus 
the  Maoris  of  New  Zealand  marked  their  lands  by  wisps  of  grass 
on  boundary  trees.  Trespassers  knew  that  the  inclosed  spaces 
were  taboo  to  aU  but  the  owner  —  by  reason  of  curses,  of  which 
the  wisp  of  grass  was  the  symbol.  A  much  more  definite  symbol  of 
ownership  would  naturally  be  the  representation  of  the  proprietor's 
name,  or  that  of  his  tribe.  The  common  use  of  this  was  possibly 
long  impeded  by  the  fear  that  an  enemy  might  secure  such  a  name- 
picture  for  evil  magic,  —  for  if  he  secures  your  name  and  anything 
of  yours,  he  can  have  power  over  you.  In  spite  of  such  fear,  — 
which  must  have  hindered  not  only  literature  but  the  development 
of  private  property,  —  the  use  of  totem  signs  is  common  to  indi- 
cate the  name  of  a  tribe  or  clan. 

The  earliest  inscriptions,  out  of  which  grow  the  records  of 
history,  were,  like  these,  mere  monograms  of  names.  They  were, 
of  course,  the  monograms  of  royal  names,  stamped  on  Egyptian 
stone  or  Babylonian  brick,  much  as  the  letter  boxes  of  England 
bear  the  symbol  G.  R.  to  indicate  the  reigning  king.  Such  mono- 
grams, chiselled  into  the  rock  over  five  thousand  years  ago,  retain 
for  us  the  name  of  the  reputed  founder  of  the  first  dynasty  of 
Egypt.  Recovered  only  a  few  years  ago,  they  prove  to  us  that 
Menes  of  Memphis,  that  shadow  figure  which  headed  the  long  list 
of  shadow  kings,  and  was  already  legend  by  the  days  of  Herodotus, 
was  a  real  man.  The  first  inscriptions  of  Babylonia  are  similar 
royal  names  and  titles.  They  are  historical  records  only  by  cour- 
tesy. Imagine  the  history  of  Anglo-Saxon  England  based  upoa 
nothing  but  the  Alfred  jewel,  or  a  historian  of  the  distant  future 


38      INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

reconstructing  the  history  of  the  Victorian  era  from  a  few  stray- 
stones  on  which  the  full  titles  of  the  empress  queen  were  en- 
graved !  In  time,  however,  the  titles  expand,  indicating  con- 
quests by  including  new  dignities  and  enumerating  the  lands 
over  which  the  monarch  rules.  As  the  years  go  on  the  titles 
grow  more  specific  and  detailed,  and  now  and  then  in  the  boastful 
phrases  of  an  epitaph  (which  had  been  carefully  prepared  during 
the  lifetime  of  the  king),  we  have  almost  a  summary  of  the  main 
events  of  the  reign.  This,  for  instance,  is  as  far  as  the  records  of 
the  old  Babylonian  kingdom  seem  to  have  gone. 

As  we  have  seen,  the  narrative  grows  out  of  the  simple  inscrip- 
tion almost  unconsciously.  Indeed  it  exists  to  some  extent  in 
the  titles  themselves,  since  the  graphic  hieroglyph  tells  the  story 
as  it  depicts  the  results.  The  lord  of  the  upper  Nile  smites  the 
cowering  inhabitants,  the  conqueror  of  Syria  carries  away  the 
Semitic  victims  in  chains.  But  the  narrative  also  develops,  along- 
side the  public  inscriptions,  in  tombs  and  temples ;  in  tombs 
for  the  gods  to  read,  in  temples  for  the  priests.  Here,  at  last, 
we  are  on  the  verge  of  history ;  the  temple  record  is  the 
origin  of  annals.  We  are  not  beyond  the  verge,  however,  for 
these  bald  narratives  are  not  histories,  in  the  strictest  sense.  His- 
tory is  retrospective ;  these  are  mere  lists  of  contemporary  happen- 
ings. As  the  calendar  developed,  the  events  were  entered  year  by 
year,  giving  us  annals.  But  still  that  did  not  make  them  history. 
They  were  a  sort  of  primitive  journalism  or  official  record,  marking 
the  present,  not  the  past.  The  annalist  writes  down  what  is 
happening  or  has  just  taken  place.  He  enters  on  the  temple  lists 
the  death  of  a  priest  or  king  when  it  occurs,  or  registers  conquests 
under  the  royal  command  of  the  conqueror  himself.  It  is  only 
because  the  present  is  eternally  becoming  the  past  that  these  notes 
of  contemporary  events  take  on  the  character  of  history  —  as 
today's  evening  papers  will  be  history  tomorrow. 

But  the  annal  is  also  potentially  historical.  The  past,  not  the 
present,  gives  it  its  value  and  interest.  Moreover,  the  step  from 
the  annal  to  the  chronicle  is  a  short  one.  Add  a  few  genealogies  or 
the  legendary  deeds  of  the  sovereign's  divine  ancestors  and  the 
narrative  becomes  historical.  Where  such  a  narrative  follows  a 
rigid  scheme  of  years,  as  in  the  annal,  we  term  it  a  chronicle.     To 


BOOKS  AND  WRITING  39 

the  reader  of  the  narrative  there  is  Httle  diflference,  and  the  two 
terms  are  used  loosely  and  interchangeably  throughout  the  history 
of  History.  Moreover  a  pure  annal,  containing  nothing  except 
mention  of  contemporary  events,  would  be  hard  to  find.  Even 
the  official  annals  of  Rome,  inscribed  by  the  pontiffs  with  the  yearly 
exploits  of  the  citizens  or  prodigies  of  the  gods,  contained  portions 
of  the  earlier  years  rewritten  from  later  sources. 

The  subject  matter  of  the  annal  or  chronicle  was  therefore  a 
miscellany,  woven  out  of  religion,  war,  catastrophes,  legendary 
exploits  or  mere  business  items.  Genealogies,  for  instance,  which 
patriarchal  illiteracy  perpetuated  in  the  sing-song  verses,  were 
more  safely  embalmed  in  writing.  These  were  especially  valued  by 
noble  houses,  who,  in  imitation  of  royalty,  were  sure  to  reach  the 
gods  at  the  other  end.  Needless  to  say,  while  they  afford  many 
a  hint  to  the  student  of  today,  they  were  not  more  reliable  than, 
those  prepared  for  some  of  our  fellow-citizens  at  present. 

Since  the  annalists  were  generally  the  priests  they  early  kept 
temple  records,  mainly  from  a  business  instinct.  Donations  from 
pharaohs  or  kings  were  sure  to  be  entered,  votive  tablets  recording 
miracles  accomplished  at  a  shrine  fitted  the  scheme,  as  well  as 
accounts  of  prodigies  and  portents ;  and  along  with  these  developed 
lists  of  priests  and  priestesses  in  long  succession.  But  most  im- 
portant of  all,  they  noted  the  festivals  of  the  gods,  and  in  watch- 
ing the  recurring  seasons,  with  the  changing  moon  and  the  lucky 
and  unlucky  days,  they  began  to  measure  Time.  This,  along  with 
the  discovery  of  writing  itself,  was  the  most  decisive  forward  step 
in  the  history  of  History  —  perhaps  hardly  less  in  the  history  of 
civilization.    We  must  turn  aside  to  consider  it  in  some  detail. 


CHAPTER  IV 
THE  MEASURING  OF  TIME 

Time  is  the  basis  of  history,  as  space  is  of  geography  or  matter 
of  the  physical  sciences.  Until  some  method  of  keeping  accurate 
track  of  it  was  discovered,  the  data  of  history  were  like  an  uncharted 
land  or  an  unanalyzed  substance.  To  us  with  our  almanacs  this 
seems  like  the  simplest  matter  of  observation  and  arithmetic, 
merely  a  counting  of  days,  weeks,  months  and  years.  But  when 
history  began  there  were  no  almanacs  or  calendars  to  consult. 
Weeks  were  unknown,  months  were  observed  only  from  the  super- 
stitious fears  and  beliefs  attached  to  the  changing  moon,  and  the 
revolving  years  were  too  vast  and  vague  extents  of  time  to  be 
measured  off  with  any  accuracy.  There  are  really  only  two  meas- 
ures of  time  of  which  the  primitive  mind  is  fully  conscious:  the 
day  —  and  one  day  is  like  another ;  and  the  season  —  and  the 
seasons  vary.  A  little  thought  shows  that  whole  new  sciences  had 
to  be  evolved  before  the  dates  could  be  set  along  the  margin  of 
our  annals  —  the  sciences  which  make  possible  astronomy  and 
through  it  a  settled  calendar  for  events  that  recur,  and  a  fixed 
chronology  for  those  which  happen  but  once.^ 

Anthropologists  point  out  that  the  greatest  social  revolution 
of  primitive  mankind  came  about  when  men,  settling  on  the  soil 
instead  of  wandering,  and  so  accumulating  goods  which  involved 
foresight,  began  to  calculate  for  a  future.  From  that  dim  sensing 
of  futurity  in  which  civilization  dawned,  the  whole  evolution  of 
society  has  been  conditioned  by  some  reckoning  of  the  passing 
of  time.  The  calendars  upon  our  walls  make  this  now  so  simple 
and  familiar  that  the  fact  escapes  our  attention.  But  it  takes  con- 
siderably more  thought  than  most  people  are  ever  likely  to  devote 
to  it,  to  realize  that  the  calendar  itself  is  an  invention  rather  than 
a   discovery,    an   art-creation,    magnificent   in   its   mathematical 

*  Cf.  J.  T.  Shotwell,  The  Discovery  of  Time,  in  The  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psychology 
and  Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  XII  (1915),  Nos.  8,  10,  12. 

40 


THE  MEASURING  OF  TIME  41 

perfection,  but  a  product  of  human  ingenuity  all  the  same,  and 
not  the  mere  revelation  of  some  laws  of  nature. 

Yet  the  artificial  character  of  our  calendar  can  be  seen  very 
easily.  Some  of  our  time-divisions  are  artificial  on  the  face  of  them, 
—  the  divisions  of  the  day  and  the  massing  of  days  into  weeks.  We 
could  do  without  seconds  or  even  minutes  without  much  incon- 
venience ;  and  do  so  most  of  the  time.  Even  hours  vary  greatly. 
The  twelve-hour  unit  comes  to  us  from  Babylon,  through  Ionian 
Greece,  —  twelve  being  like  our  ten,  the  unit  of  measurement  for 
anything.  We  might  as  well  have  had  a  decimal  instead  of  a  duo- 
decimal system;  it  all  depended  on  the  arithmetical  tables  one 
used.  But  one  should  not  put  too  much  stress  on  the  hour  as  a 
division  of  the  day,  for,  in  general,  it  is  only  the  point  of  time, 
within  the  hour  or  at  its  beginning  or  close,  of  which  we  are  keenly 
conscious,  —  especially  the  time  for  commencing  or  quitting  work. 
It  is  the  same  with  weeks.  There  were  none  in  ancient  Greece  or 
Rome.  They,  too,  like  the  hours,  come  apparently  from  Babylon. 
They  mark  off  seven  days,  because  seven  was  a  sacred  number. 
Habits  and  religious  beliefs  have  settled  this  cycle  upon  our  minds 
with  the  weight  of  centuries ;  the  rhythmic  Sunday  pause  in  our 
busy  week-day  industries  impresses  itself  upon  the  imagination 
so  that  poetically  inclined  people  attribute  to  nature  itself  a  restful 
note  upon  the  sacred  day.  But  this  is  merely  our  tribute  to  social 
convention  and  taboo.  Every  day  is  a  sun-day.  Weeks  are  a 
fiction  based  upon  superstition  but  perpetuated  for  their  social 
value.  Even  now,  however,  there  are  many  people  who  pay  no 
attention  to  them ;  in  the  mills  of  modern  industry,  on  railways 
or  ships,  where  work  continues  without  ceasing,  the  weeks  are 
practically  unrecognizable.  But  days,  months  and  years  are  dif- 
ferent. Here  nature  seems  itself  to  mark  an  interval.  The  turn- 
ing of  the  earth  on  its  axis,  of  the  moon  around  the  earth  and  the 
earth  around  the  sun,  seems  to  furnish  real  units.  It  was  undoubt- 
edly these  which  first  gave  men  a  mathematical  idea  of  time.  But 
when  we  come  to  apply  the  lesson,  it  is  not  so  easy. 

The  calendar  began  in  registering  these  celestial  phenomena. 
The  first  chronometer  was  the  universe  itself;  its  ever-recur- 
ring movements  struck  off  the  days,  months  and  years  as 
our  clocks  now  strike  off  the  hours.    The  days  and  years  are 


42    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

thus  in  reality  on  a  par  with  the  minutes  and  the  hours,  only 
they  are  the  product  of  a  larger  clock.  Unfortunately,  however, 
the  clocks  of  the  universe  do  not  run  together.  The  days  do  not 
fit  the  years  and  the  months  fit  neither  one.  The  exact  solar 
year  is  not  even  365I  days,  awkward  as  that  multiple  would  be ; 
it  is  365  days,  5  hours,  48  minutes,  46  seconds !  We  have  frankly 
given  up  trying  to  keep  track  of  months  that  reaUy  go  by  the 
changes  of  the  moon  —  a  cycle  that  has  no  relation  to  our  night 
or  day.  Yet  this  was  the  unit  for  twenty  or  thirty  centuries  in 
that  home  of  astronomy,  Babylon.  When  we  pause  a  moment  to 
consider  these  things,  we  begin  to  realize  what  baffiing  mathematics 
lies  behind  our  calendars  and  almanacs.  For  there  are  the  stars, 
too,  to  keep  track  of,  with  their  revolutions  and  conjunctions, 
coming  and  going  at  all  sorts  of  intervals,  planets  zigzagging  across 
the  heavens  in  crazy  patterns,  out  of  touch  with  everything,  and 
yet  somehow  forming,  apparently  with  sun  and  moon,  a  final  unit, 
composing  a  universe.  What  a  tangled  problem  for  Babylonian 
and  Egyptian  astronomers  to  work  out !  No  Chaldaean  shepherds, 
"killing  time"  in  pastoral  loneliness  and  innocence,  were  ever  able 
to  evolve  the  science  of  astronomy.  That  venerable  myth  stUl 
lingers  in  respectable  books ;  but  astronomy  was  the  product  of 
learned  priests,  those  first  scientists  and  intellectual  leaders,  who 
developed  it,  through  astrology,  for  the  service  of  religion. 

The  calendar  developed  everywhere  as  a  cycle  of  religious  feasts. 
It  was  the  gods,  not  men,  for  whom  or  by  whom  the  days  were  first 
marked  out.  The  times  for  hunting  and  fishing,  for  sowing  and 
reaping,  the  phases  of  the  moon,  the  summer  and  winter  solstice, 
and  the  like,  upon  which  the  attention  of  primitive  men  was  so 
forcibly  directed,  early  became  associated  with  some  idea  of  mirac- 
ulous power.  The  times  themselves  became  "lucky  "  or  " unlucky " 
—  an  idea  still  so  common  that  we  never  stop  to  ask  what  it  means.^ 
There  was  an  uncanny  power  let  loose  in  the  world  when  the  moon 
still  hung  visible  in  the  sky  by  day,  or  under  the  blazing  mid- 
summer sun.  The  primitive  man  cannot  exactly  tell  whether  the 
power  is  in  the  moon  or  sun  or  the  day  itself,  but  on  that  day  he 
knows  that  it  is  there.     So  when  animism  produces  its  gods  and 

1  See  Hutton  Webster,  Rest  Days,  a  Study  in  Early  Law  and  Morality  (1916),  for 
an  exhaustive  survey  of  time  taboos. 


THE  MEASURING  OF  TIME  43 

demons  these  days  are  consecrated  to  them.  The  time  for  reaping 
is  sacred  to  the  god  of  the  harvest,  and  so  forth.  The  old  scruples 
take  a  more  definite  turn.  A  part  of  the  time  becomes  the  property 
of  the  gods.  It  is  henceforth  a  violation  of  divine  law  to  work  or 
transact  business  on  the  days  thus  set  apart.  HoHdays  were  at 
first  genuinely  holy  days,  and  the  calendar  grew  up  around  them. 
It  was  necessary  to  find  some  way  by  which  the  festival  day,  the 
dies  nefastus,  on  which  business  was  sacrilege,^  should  not  be  violated. 
It  was  taboo ;  to  violate  it  was  not  only  wrong  but  dangerous. 
The  power  of  an  inherent  curse,  which  is  essential  in  the  early 
idea  of  the  sacred,  protected  it  and  assured  it  social  recognition. 
Accordingly  it  had  to  be  kept  track  of  in  order  to  ensure  that  the 
proper  ceremonies  should  be  celebrated  upon  it.  Hence  the  elabora- 
tion of  that  succession  of  religious  feasts  and  fasts  which  still  per- 
sists in  our  church  calendar.  The  idea  would  not  naturally  occur 
to  one  that  the  lists  of  saints'  days  and  holy  days  which  preface  our 
liturgies  are  the  historic  remnants  of  the  first  marking  of  time. 
But  in  the  practically  universal  superstitions  about  planting 
crops,  gathering  herbs  or  doing  almost  anything  in  the  dark  or  the 
full  of  the  moon  we  have  a  trace  of  something  infinitely  older  than 
any  sacred  date  in  the  prayer-book  —  a  first  vague  fear  of  the  un- 
usual or  uncanny,  out  of  which  theologies,  as  well  as  calendars, 
were  born. 

Once  grant  that  days  differ  in  their  virtues,  that  some  are  good 
for  one  thing,  some  for  another,  it  is  of  the  utmost  importance 
to  know  which  is  which.  In  Hesiod's  Works  and  Days  we  have 
the  program  outlined  for  the  farmer  of  the  earliest  age  of  historic 
Greece.  In  the  so-called  Calendar  of  Numa  we  have  the  priestly 
reckoning  for  ancient  Rome.  But  in  Egypt  and  especially  in 
Babylon,  where  the  sky  is  so  clear  that,  as  the  report  ran  in  Rome, 
even  the  stars  cast  shadows,  the  mechanism  of  the  heavens  first 
produced  an  adequate  system. 

Babylon  bears  the  proud  title  of  Mother  of  Astronomy.  It 
was  a  title  already  admitted  by  Greeks  and  Romans,  to  whom  the 
words  "Chaldaean"  and  "astronomer"  (or  rather  astrologer) 
were  practically  synonymous.     Modern  scholars  agree  as  to  the 

'  The  Romans,  characteristically  viewing  things  from  the  practical  point  of  view, 
had  the  terms  inverted ;  the  dies  fasti  were  those  on  which  business  was  hermitted. 


44    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

justness  of  the  claim ;  but  the  careful  study  of  newly  found  inscrip- 
tions places  the  scientific  achievements  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria 
not  at  the  opening  but  at  the  close  of  their  long  history.  However 
much  the  priests  of  those  distant  centuries  watched  the  heavens 
for  portents  and  omens,  their  observations  were  not  sufficiently 
systematic  to  enable  them  to  measure  the  recurring  periods  of  sun, 
moon  and  stars  with  that  accuracy  necessary  for  an  unvarying 
calendar  until  after  at  least  two  thousand  years  of  priestly  lore. 
The  Semites  clung  with  the  conservatism  of  superstition  to  the 
phases  of  the  moon.  Although  they  had  grown  civilized,  —  and 
civilization  must  arrange  its  work  according  to  the  sun,  because 
nature  does  so  too,  bringing  the  recurring  duties  of  the  seasons, 

—  these  old  desert-dwellers,  and  their  neighbors  who  learned  of 
them,  never  broke  away  from  the  lunar  month  and  the  lunar  year. 

No  one  knows  when  or  how  this  reckoning  was  first  adopted ; 
but  a  study  of  primitive  peoples  the  world  over  today  shows  that 
the  moon  and  not  the  sun  is  generally  the  earliest  guide  toward 
the  calendar.  Wherever  agriculture  is  not  much  developed,  the 
moon  dominates,  owing  both  to  its  uncanny  associations  and  to 
the  shortness  of  its  cycle.  The  origins  of  the  lunar  calendar  of 
Babylonia,  therefore,  apparently  lie  beyond  all  the  long  story  of 
its  civilization.  The  records  themselves  carry  us  back,  however, 
to  the  middle  of  the  third  millennium,  when  we  find  a  Babylonian 
year  of  twelve  lunar  months,  making  up  354  days,  with  a  thirteenth 
month  thrown  in  once  in  a  while  —  making  that  year  384  days  — 
to  bring  the  religious  festivals  and  the  business  world  right  again. 
There  was  no  absolute  certainty  as  to  what  years  should  be  length- 
ened and  what  ones  should  be  left  the  normal  length ;  the  matter 
was  in  the  hands  of  the  priests.  This  unwieldy  calendar  spread 
throughout  western  Asia,  wherever  the  cuneiform  script  carried  the 
message  of  Babylonian  culture.     It  was  adopted  by  the  Jews  and, 

—  apart  from  other  fragments  of  it  embedded  in  our  calendar,  — 
we  still  have  a  positive  reminder  of  its  difficulties  in  our  festival  of 
Easter. 

But  so  much  observation  of  the  moon  ultimately  produced  an 
astronomical  cycle  of  great  importance,  that  of  the  moon  with 
reference  to  the  sun.  It  was  discovered  that  in  nineteen  years 
the  moon  returned  to  almost  its  original  position  with  reference 


THE  MEASURING  OF  TIME  45 

to  the  sun/  a  period  destined  to  be  used  for  chronology  by  the 
Greeks.  This  discovery  was  not  made  until  the  eighth  and  seventh 
centuries  B.C.,  however,  in  that  period  when  the  study  of  the  uni- 
verse began  to  assume  more  calculable  form,  and  astrology  —  still 
rooted  in  religion,  but  verging  toward  science  —  rose  to  supersede 
the  crude  old  fantasies  of  the  earlier  and  barbarous  priestcraft. 
Then  we  come  upon  a  strange  and  happy  interworking  of  calendar 
and  chronology.  To  foretell  an  eclipse,  or  a  conjunction  of  the 
stars,  it  was  necessary  to  know  the  period  of  time  which  had  elapsed 
between  such  eclipses  or  conjunctions  in  the  past.  So,  looking 
forward  to  forecast  the  future,  the  astrologer  found  himself  obliged 
to  consult  the  records  of  the  past,  and  the  more  he  sought  for 
accuracy  in  his  calendar  the  more  he  needed  it  in  the  royal  or 
priestly  annals  which  supplied  him  with  the  data  upon  which  he 
had  to  build.  In  short,  mathematics  began  to  emerge  from  the 
position  of  a  mere  tool  of  superstition,  in  which  the  luck  of  numbers 
combined  with  that  of  the  stars  in  a  jumble  of  folly,  and  to  assume 
its  proper  role  as  the  basis  of  definite  knowledge. 

This  was  an  epoch  in  the  history  of  thought,  an  epoch  of  funda- 
mental importance  for  history,  for  from  that  time  to  the  present^7 
the  years  have  been  numbered  in  regular,  unbroken  succession. 
The  list  of  the  kings  of  Assyria  whose  dates  are  thus  fixed  and 
accurate  began  in  the  year  747  B.C.,  the  first  year  of  a  somewhat 
insignificant  monarch,  Nabonassar.  This  list  was  used  by  the 
great  astronomers  of  Alexandria,  who  finally  worked  out  the  problem 
of  calendar  and  chronology  as  far  as  they  were  solved  in  antiquity, 
and  it  has  been  preserved  in  what  is  called  the  Canon  of  Ptolemy. 
Through  these  savants  the  Baby  Ionian- Assyrian  year  was  translated 
into  the  "fixed"  year  of  Egypt,  i.e.  365!  days ;  and  to  the  "Era  of 
Nabonassar  "  were  added  those  of  the  Persian  and  Alexandrian 
empires,  and  finally  the  list  of  Roman  emperors,  down  to  the  year 
160  of  our  era.  So  that  from  747  B.C.  until  the  present,  the  years  have 
been  kept  track  of  in  continuous,  if  varied,  reckoning.  But  the  Canon 
of  Ptolemy  was  used  by  astronomers,  not  by  antique  historians. - 

^The  time  between  eclipses  was  seen  to  be  i8  years,  ii  days,  or  223  lunations 
("Saros"). 

2  The  importance  of  the  "Era  of  Nabonassar"  for  chronologists  was  first  seen  by 
Panodorus,  the  creator  of  the  Alexandrian  school  of  chronologers,  in  the  opening  of 


46    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

The  mention  of  Alexandria  naturally  suggests  the  contribution 
of  Egypt.  But  it  was  not  Egyptian  so  much  as  Greek  science  which 
made  the  name  of  Alexandria  so  illustrious  in  antiquity,  and  the 
great  astronomers  who  worked  there  found  little  in  the  long  cen- 
turies of  Egyptian  culture  to  help  them  in  their  study  of  astronomy 
or  chronology.  This  seems  strangely  paradoxical  when  one  reads 
in  modern  histories  of  ancient  Egypt  of  the  great  achievements  of 
its  science  and,  above  all,  that  it  bears  an  even  prouder  title  than 
Babylon  as  the  land  which  produced  the  solar  year.  The  date 
when  that  event  took  place  is  a  matter  of  dispute  among  Egyptolo- 
gists; but  if  the  calendar  year  of  365  days  was  introduced  at  a 
time  when  it  fitted  the  solar  year  day  for  day,  the  nineteenth  of 
July,^  4241  B.C.,  would  be  the  first  day  of  the  year  one  of  the  new 
calendar.  This  date  is  reached  by  calculating  back  from  a  known 
date  in  the  third  century  of  our  era,  when  a  Latin  writer,  Censorinus, 
tells  us  that  the  solar  year  of  Egypt  was  two  months  behind  the 
calendar  year.  As  the  calendar  year  was  about  a  quarter  of  a 
day  short  in  length,  it  had  been  gaining  on  the  solar  year  that  much 
yearly,  so  that  in  1460  years  (4X365),  it  would  gain  a  whole  year. 
Thus,  the  two  had  coincided  about  140  a.d.,  of  which  fact  further 
evidence  exists,  and  again  at  1460-year  intervals.  The  third  of 
these,  4241  B.C.,  is,  in  the  opinion  of  Professors  Eduard  Meyer 
and  J.  H.  Breasted,  the  starting  point  for  the  invention  of  the 
calendar.^  It  was  a  remarkable  achievement.  What  long  and 
puzzling  computation,  what  tables  of  priestly  science  and  records, 
were  at  the  disposal  of  those  who  inaugurated  it,  no  one  can  tell. 
When  one  compares  this  solar  year,  only  a  little  over  six  hours 
wrong,  with  the  grossly  inaccurate  lunar  year  of  354  or  355  days 
in  use  in  the  rest  of  the  world  throughout  most  of  antique  history, 
it  seems  at  first  to  indicate  something  like  a  Hellenic  rationalism 

the  fifth  century  a.d.  See  H.  Gelzer,  Sextus  Julius  Africanus  und  die  hyzantinische 
Chronologie  (1898),  Part  II,  p.  227,  who  traces  the  development  of  the  Canon  of 
Ptolemy  through  the  Syncellus  into  Byzantine  chronology  and  so  opens  up  the  con- 
nection with  the  Middle  Ages. 

1  The  day  when  the  star  Sirius  rose  at  dawn,  at  the  opening  of  the  Nile  floods. 

*  For  discussion,  see  J.  H.  Breasted's  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  I,  Sects. 
38  sqq.  There  is  a  short,  clear  account  by  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near 
East,  p.  19.  The  chief  protagonist  of  the  longer  chronology  of  Egypt,  Professor 
Flinders  Petrie,  is  now  regarded  as  having  been  extreme. 


THE  MEASURING  OF  TIME  47 

at  work  in  Egypt  as  long  before  the  Greeks  as  we  are  since  them. 
But  this  impression  of  Egyptian  superiority  is  hardly  borne  out  by 
fuller  study.  For,  not  only  did  Egypt  fail  to  make  good  its  early 
promise  in  astronomy/  but  by  failing  to  rectify  the  error  of  a  quarter 
of  a  day,  its  calendar  year  came  to  have  no  real  correspondence 
with  the  solar  year,  as  we  have  seen.  And,  finally,  the  ancient 
Egyptian  did  not  know  how  to  make  the  discrepancy  between  the 
official  and  the  true  solar  calendar  the  basis  of  a  calculation  of 
dates  in  history.  There  is  no  trace  of  his  having  used  the  (Sothic) 
cycle  of  1460  years.  It  is  the  modern  scholar  who  uses  it  to  check 
up  his  calculations. 

In  chronology,  therefore,  as  in  the  calendar,  the  Egyptians  have 
no  such  contribution  as  might  be  expected  from  the  promise  of  their 
early  texts.  Moreover,  the  more  detailed  data  for  chronology 
are  as  irregular  as  the  calendar.  The  years  were  numbered,  not 
in  a  straight  and  continuous  succession,  but  according  to  striking 
events,  campaigns,  the  years  of  the  pharaoh's  reign,  or  (especially) 
the  levy  of  taxes.  When  the  state  was  thoroughly  organized,  the 
treasury  officials  ''numbered"  the  royal  possessions  every  two 
years,  and  the  regnal  years  were  known  as  "Year  of  the  First 
Numbering,"  "Year  after  First  Numbering,"  "Year  of  the  Second 
Numbering,"  etc.  Whatever  knowledge  the  priests  may  have 
had  of  the  period  involved  in  the  long  succession  of  Egyptian 
dynasties,  —  and  Hecataeus  and  Herodotus  show  that  they  had 
some,  —  it  was  left  for  the  twentieth  century  a.d.  to  disentangle 
the  problem  for  the  world  at  large ;  and  much  is  still  to  do. 

The  Babylonians  and  Assyrians  had  the  practice  of  naming 
rather  than  numbering  their  years.  There  was  some  priestly  or 
royal  functionary  whose  duty  it  was  to  proclaim  what  event  or 
man  should  give  the  name  to  the  year.  It  was  to  be  the  year  of 
the  magistracy  of  so-and-so,  or  the  year  when  a  battle  was  fought 
or  a  city  taken.  There  is  a  touch  of  casual  history  in  this,  but  it 
is  too  haphazard  to  be  of  much  use.  For  in  the  first  place,  one  never 
knew,  until  the  functionary  made  up  his  mind  —  perhaps  toward  the 
end  of  the  year  —  what  the  year  really  was  !  Combine  that  with  a 
lunar  calendar,  and  one  can  see  that  there  is  work  for  the  Baby- 
lonian scholar  as  he  struggles  with  the  problem  of  Sumerian  date- 
'  It  even  failed  to  note  eclipses. 


48    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

lists,  which  contain  the  names  of  the  years,  as  recorded  by  the 
Babylonian  scribes.^  Neither  Greeks  nor  Romans  worked  out  by 
themselves  any  adequate  reckoning  of  time.  The  lunar  year  was 
the  basis,  and  with  all  their  ingenuity,  they  could  not  make  it  work. 
In  Greece  it  was  easily  seen  that  the  354  days  did  not  exactly  fit 
the  twelve  lunations  of  the  year,  being  short  by  8.8  hours.  So  (if 
the  old  accounts  are  correct)  they  put  in  a  month  every  second 
solar  year,  which  brought  the  total  up  to  about  7I  days  more  than 
the  right  amount.  In  order  to  meet  this  inaccuracy,  the  inter- 
calation was  then  omitted  every  eighth  year.  This  octaeteris  or 
luni-solar  cycle  of  eight  years  was  in  itself  not  rigorously  exact 
and  was  not  systematically  carried  out.  In  432  B.C.  the  astronomer 
Meton  proposed  the  19-year  luni-solar  cycle,  of  which  we  have 
spoken  above.  It  was  not  adopted,  however,  until  the  second  half 
of  the  fourth  century.  Once  adopted,  it  was  naturally  destined 
to  play  a  very  important  role  in  later  classical  and  ecclesiastical 
chronology.  The  astronomical  cycle  is  really  slightly  less  than 
19  years,  however,  and  further  corrections  were  necessary.  In  fact 
so  long  as  the  motions  of  the  moon  remained  the  basis  of  reckoning, 
the  calendar  was  sure  to  be  imperfect. 

The  Romans  began  with  a  lunar  calendar,  but  since  they  re- 
garded odd  numbers  as  the  lucky  ones,  they  made  the  year  355 
instead  of  354  days.  Then  they  added  a  month  every  second  year, 
inserting  it  between  the  23d  and  24th  of  February,  so  that  the 
mean  length  was  366I  days.  To  get  rid  of  the  extra  day  they  had 
recourse  to  a  clumsy  device,  —  perhaps  based  upon  the  old  Greek 
eight-year  cycle,  —  ordering  that  every  third  period  of  eight  years 
should  have  three  instead  of  four  intercalary  months,  and  that  they 
should  be  of  22  days  each.  This  made  the  year  365 j  days.  But 
the  pontiffs  were  left  discretion  in  adjusting  the  calendar  to  the 
needs  of  astronomy,  and  they  seem  to  have  adjusted  it  (in  some 
cases  at  least)  rather  to  the  needs  of  their  friends,  —  having  long 
years  when  those  were  in  office  whom  they  wished  to  favor,  and 
short  ones  when  their  enemies  were  in  power  !  In  any  case,  the  cal- 
endar fell  into  such  confusion  in  the  last  years  of  the  republic  that 
it  was  out  by  three  months,  judging  by  the  solar  year.    The  decree 

1  There  is  a  clear,  short  summary  in  R.  W.  Rogers,  A  History  of  Babylonia  and 
Assyria  (2  vols.,  6th  ed.,  1915),  Vol.  I,  Chap.  XIII. 


THE   MEASURING  OF  TIME  49 

of  Julius  Caesar  was  the  result,  fixing  the  year  at  365  days  with  an 
extra  day  in  every  fourth  year.  The  ancients  have  attributed  the 
reform  to  the  intercourse  with  the  savants  of  Alexandria,  but  there 
is  also  some  ground  for  connecting  it  with  a  simple  old-fashioned 
solar  year  of  Italian  farmers,  of  which  we  have  fragmentary  but 
definite  traces  even  in  the  official  calendar,  and  which  in  its  turn 
may  have  been  affected  by  the  farming  calendar  of  the  Greeks^ 
If  this  be  true  we  have  a  single  line  from  Hesiod  to  Caesar. 

The  first  reformed  year  began  on  the  first  of  January,  46  B.C. 
(708  A.  U.  C).  The  months  took  their  place  in  it,^  and  then 
Christianity  brought  in  the  weeks  from  Judaea  —  and  Babylon. 
The  year  remained,  as  we  have  seen,  a  fraction  of  a  day  too  short, 
and  there  was  no  absolute  agreement  yet  as  to  when  it  should  begin. 
But  these  were  matters  never  settled  until  the  sixteenth  and  even 
the  eighteenth  centuries  of  our  era. 

We  need  to  know  this  much  of  the  origins  of  the  calendar  in 
order  to  complete  our  survey  of  antique  chronology.  In  both 
Greece  and  Rome,  —  after  the  fashion  of  Babylon  and  Egypt,  — 
the  year  bore  the  name  of  the  ruling  magistrates.  In  Rome  it 
was  named  after  the  consuls,  in  Athens  after  the  first  archon,  in 
Sparta  after  the  first  ephor,  etc.  As  it  was  found  necessary  for 
practical  purposes  to  keep  lists  of  these,  from  the  calendar  we  pass 
not  only  to  chronology  but  to  the  crudest  of  annals.^  Thucydides, 
for  instance,  had  only  the  Athenian  lists  of  archons,  the  Spartan 
lists  of  ephors  and  the  lists  of  the  priestesses  of  Hera  in  the  temple 
of  Argos  to  rely  upon,  in  addition  to  the  festivals.^    The  cycle  of 

'  Julius  Caesar's  months  were  to  be  of  alternate  length,  the  odd  numbers  being 
31,  the  even  numbers  30  (except  February).  That  would  have  made  a  simple  year  to 
reckon  with.  But  when  the  eighth  month  (the  fifth  in  the  old  year)  was  named  after 
Augustus,  his  vanity  was  gratified  by  adding  a  day  to  it  to  make  it  as  long  as  that 
of  Julius.  Then,  in  order  to  avoid  having  three  months  of  31  days  together,  Septem- 
ber and  November  were  reduced  to  30,  and  31  were  given  to  October  and  December. 

2  The  vagueness  of  an  idea  of  extent  of  time  in  Greek  history  can  be  seen  by  the 
fact  that  "generations"  were  used  to  help  reckon  time  and  this  was  roughly  put  at  S3 
years,  although  the  period  varies.     In  Herodotus  one  comes  upon  a  system  of  23  years. 

3  The  only  continuous  list  of  the  Attic  archons  which  has  come  down  to  us  is  a 
copy  preserved  in  the  history  of  Diodorus,  but  a  growing  body  of  inscriptions  supple- 
ments it  now,  and  enables  the  modern  scholar  to  recover  more  than  the  ancients  knew 
themselves. 


50    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

the  Olympiad,  the  four-year  period  based  upon  the  celebration  of 
the  Olympic  games,  by  which  later  ages  reckoned  Greek  history,  was 
never  used  officially  by  the  city  states,  and  really  was  not  taken  over 
by  historians  and  chronographers  until  about  the  end  of  the  third 
century  B.C.  The  credit  for  its  introduction  seems  to  belong  to 
Timseus  (c.  350  B.C.),  an  indefatigable  antiquarian  and  historian 
whose  unphilosophical  cast  of  mind  apparently  left  him  free  to 
indulge  a  singularly  un-Hellenic  taste  for  dates.  But  it  was  a 
geographer  rather  than  a  historian  who  finally  attacked  the  problem 
of  chronology  in  a  critical  spirit.  Eratosthenes,  who  flourished 
about  276  to  194  B.C.,  and  who,  as  librarian  of  the  Alexandrian 
library,  was  equipped  with  the  science  of  the  East  as  well  as  with  his 
native  Hellenic  genius,  fixed  the  dates  of  the  great  epochs  of  Greek 
history  in  what  was  destined  to  be  the  accepted  chronology  of 
antique  as  well  as  of  Christian  historians.  Into  this  we  cannot  go 
further  at  present.^  Nor  need  we  do  so  for  this  chapter  of  our 
history  of  History.  The  crude  old  reckoning  of  Rome,  from  the 
fabled  founding  of  the  city,  753  B.C.,  and  the  Olympiads  remained, 
for  later  classical  antiquity,  the  two  eras  in  general  use. 

Looking  over  this  chapter  of  our  intellectual  evolution  one  is 
impressed  with  the  slowness  of  its  progress.  The  ancient  world 
could  come  to  its  full  maturity  without  any  clear  idea  of  the  passing 
years,  with  even  no  accurate  knowledge  of  what  a  year  should  be. 
Yet  does  not  such  vagueness  correspond- with  our  own  experience? 
The  past  is  all  one  to  us;  yesterday  as  dead  as  the  centuries  of 
Egypt.  Only  by  the  magic  of  memory  can  we  even  recall  its  faded 
color  or  catch  an  echo  of  its  silenced  voices.  How  that  memory 
has  become  a  social  and  undying  heritage,  a  heritage  that  hallows 
its  own  possessions,  is  the  theme  of  the  chapters  which  follow 
on  the  history  of  History. 

'  ApoUodorus  of  Athens,  applying  the  conclusions  of  Eratosthenes,  drew  up  a 
metrical  Chronica  in  four  books,  dedicated  to  Attalus  of  Pergamum,  which  became 
the  popular  handbook  on  the  subject.  Both  this  and  the  works  of  Eratosthenes  are 
lost,  but  fragments  were  preserved  by  the  Christian  chronologers,  Julius  Africanus, 
Eusebius,  Jerome  and  Georgius  Syncellus,  and  so  this  still  is  a  primary  base  for  the  old 
Greek  chronology.  Vide  H.  Gelzer,  Sextus  Julius  Africanus  und  die  byzantinische 
Chronologic. 


CHAPTER  V 

EGYPTIAN  ANNALS 

The  historians  of  ancient  Egypt  and  Babylonia  are  not  an- 
cient Egyptians  or  Babylonians  but  modern  archaeologists.  Their 
achievement  —  one  of  the  greatest  in  all  the  history  of  scholarship 

—  piecing  together  the  annals  of  centuries  which  often  left  no 
conscious  record  of  their  own,  has  obscured  the  poorness  of  the 
sources  out  of  which  the  history  of  the  earliest  civilizations  is  made. 
In  reality  the  written  history  of  the  first  nations  of  the  ancient 
world  was  a  very  slight  affair.  In  all  that  vast  spoil  of  the  East 
which  now  lies  in  our  museums,  there  is  a  surprisingly  small  amount 
of  genuine  historical  record. 

It  is  possible,  of  course,  to  make  too  confident  statements  about 
the  scope  of  a  subject  of  which  our  knowledge  depends  almost 
entirely  upon  chance.  For  it  is  chance  which  has  preserved 
what  has  been  preserved  of  the  material  of  this  early  history.  The 
statement  is  true  of  all  history,  but  is  especially  applicable  where 
thousands  of  years  and  changing  civilizations  have  in  turn  devas- 
tated and  used  again  the  material  of  earlier  ages.  Moreover,  the 
permanence  of  such  a  record  does  not  depend  upon  its  importance 

—  as  is  the  case,  more  or  less,  with  traditions.  It  is  due  rather  to 
the  durability  of  the  substance  upon  which  the  record  is  inscribed, 
and  the  chance  that  the  inscription  lies  undisturbed.  Mortgages 
for  garden  plots,  baked  into  the  clay  of  Babylon,  have  survived 
long  after  the  plot  was  desert  sand  and  Babylon  itself  a  heap  of 
ruins.  Sometimes  chance  plays  strange  tricks,  preserving  frail 
papyri  or  parchment  while  the  stone  disappears.  A  building  in- 
scription was  placed  upon  a  huge  stone  stela  by  Sesostris  I,  in  his 
temple  at  Heliopolis,  nearly  two  thousand  years  before  Christ. 
"The  great  block  itself  has  since  perished  utterly ;  but  the  practice- 
copy  made  by  a  scribe,  who  was  whiling  away  an  idle  hour  in  the 
sunny  temple  court,  has  survived,  and  the  fragile  roll  of  leather 
upon  which  he  was  thus  exercising  his  pen  has  transmitted  to  us 


52    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

what  the  massive  stone  could  not  preserve."  ^  The  stone  had  been 
there  five  hundred  years  before  the  copy  was  made ;  but  now  stela 
and  temple  have  alike  disappeared.  The  student  of  history  can 
never  know  how  much  of  what  was  set  down  in  distant  ages  has 
been  blotted  out  in  a  similar  manner.  Archaeology,  it  must  not  be 
forgotten,  is  a  science  of  ruins. 

By  taking  the  sources  as  we  have  them,  the  striking  fact  remains 
that  history,  the  one  branch  of  literature  which  one  might  expect  to 
find  develop  first,  seeing  that  it  carries  on  tradition  and  that  its  poetic 
counterpart  is  the  epic,  nevertheless  is  hardly  to  be  found  at  all  in 
these  early  cultures,  except  where  a  mythic  content  contributes  the 
interest  of  marvels  and  wonders,  —  a  world  flood  or  something  of 
the  sort.  In  all  the  inscriptions  of  ancient  Egypt  there  is  no  work 
that  can  be  termed  a  "history  of  Egypt."  There  are  some  annals 
that  are  expansions  of  the  lists  of  royal  names ;  and  there  are  boast- 
ful notices  of  contemporary  pharaohs,  but  of  the  idea  of  a  history  of 
the  successive  ages  of  Egyptian  civilization  there  is  not  a  trace. 

One  reason  which  has  been  advanced  for  this  absence  of  history 
in  ancient  Egypt  is  that  the  pharaoh  of  the  time  was  so  intent 
upon  his  own  greatness  that  his  courtiers  did  not  venture  to  exalt 
the  deeds  of  his  ancestors  for  fear  of  belittling  his  own.^  The  path 
to  royal  favor  lay  rather  in  covering  the  walls  of  monuments  with  in- 
scriptions describing  what  the  present  pharaoh  had  done  or  could  do. 
In  any  case,  no  successor  of  even  the  great  monarchs  of  the  eighteenth 
dynasty  ever  deigned  to  record  their  exploits  in  the  form  of  history. 
The  court  scribes  busied  themselves  with  the  more  profitable  enter- 
prise of  depicting  the  events  or  scenes  of  their  own  day.  In  the 
literature  of  ancient  Egypt,  history,  as  we  understand  it,  is  absent. 

Mention  of  "the  scribes"  recalls  the  high  esteem  in  which  their 
work  was  regarded.  It  was  the  profession  for  ambitious  men,  who 
might  rise  even  to  princely  state  by  means  of  it.^  Scribes  kept  the 
accounts  of  either  government  or  nobles,  for  everything  in  the 
large  establishments  was  recorded  by  these  busy  forerunners  of  the 
modern  lawyers  or  trust  companies.  "Nothing  was  done  under 
the  Egyptian  government  without  documents ;   lists  and  protocols 

^  J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  I,  pp.  4-5. 

^Cf.  E.  A.  W.  Budge,  The  Literature  of  the  Ancient  Egyptians  (1914),  p.  99. 

3  Cf.  A.  Erman,  Life  in  Ancient  Egypt,  Chap.  XIV. 


EGYPTIAN   ANNALS  53 

were  indispensable  even  in  the  simplest  matters  of  business.  The 
mania  for  writing  ...  is  not  characteristic  of  the  later  period  only ; 
doubtless  under  the  Old  and  the  Middle  Empire  the  scribes  wrote 
as  diligently  as  under  the  New  Empire."  ^  In  the  case  of  legal 
texts  we  have  almost  the  whole  modern  machinery.  "The  docu- 
ments were  then  given  into  the  care  of  the  chief  librarian  of  the 
department  they  concerned,  and  he  placed  them  in  large  vases  and 
catalogued  them  carefully.  .  .  ."  ^  and  so  had  them  readily  avail- 
able for  reference,  in  case  the  lord  called  for  them.  But  so  com- 
pletely was  this  bureaucracy  under  the  thumb  of  the  ruler  that  it 
does  not  furnish  a  starting  point  for  that  criticism  which  is  the  be- 
ginning of  historical  knowledge.  The  old  writings  were  sometimes 
appealed  to  in  the  practice  of  government,  as  when  the  founder 
of  the  twelfth  dynasty,  in  deciding  upon  the  boundaries  of  the 
provinces,  fell  back  upon  "what  was  written  in  the  books  and  what 
he  found  in  the  old  writings"  "because  he  so  loved  the  truth." ^ 
But  the  love  of  the  truth  for  its  own  sake,  in  the  unpractical  fields 
of  scientific  research,  was  left  for  a  later  age. 

There  is  something  mediaeval  in  the  attitude  of  later  Egypt 
toward  its  own  past,  a  sense  of  dimness,  a  failure  to  grasp  its  reality  ^ 
even  with  reference  to  such  abiding  things  as  religion.  This  was 
accentuated  by  the  change  which  came  over  hieroglyphics,  render- 
ing the  old  writing  hard  to  understand.  Under  the  circumstances 
they  did  what  other  people  have  always  done  under  the  same 
circumstances ;  their  learned  men,  mostly  priests,  sought  in  allegory 
an  explanation  for  the  texts,  and  having  found  that  key  to  the 
past  had  less  need  of  another.^ 

1  A.  Erman,  Life  in  Ancient  Egypt,  pp.  52,  ij2.  C/.  J.  H.  Breasted,  A  History  oj 
Egypt  (2d  ed.,  1909),  Chaps.  V,  XI,  XIII. 

2  A.  Erman,  op.  cit.,  p.  114.  The  largest  and  finest  of  all  the  papyri,  the  Harris 
papyrus,  is  an  enumeration  of  the  benefactions  of  Ramses  III  to  gods  and  men  during 
his  reign.  It  is  133  feet  long,  containing  117  columns,  usually  of  12  or  13  lines. 
Cf.  J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  87-88. 

3  From  R.  Lepsius,  Denkmdler  aus  Aegypten  und  Aethiopien,  Sect.  II,  Vol.  IV, 
Plate  124,  quoted  in  A.  Erman,  op.  cit.,  p.  91. 

<  Cf.  A.  Erman,  op.  cit.,  p.  39.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East, 
p.  99,  says  the  names  of  the  pre-dynastic  kings  were  to  the  men  of  the  nineteenth 
dynasty  like  Hengist  and  Horsa  to  the  English  of  today. 

6  Cf.  A.  Erman, op. cit.,  pp.  346-347.  "In  this  respect  the  Egyptian  scholars  did  but 
follow  the  same  course  as  the  mystical  writers  of  the  Middle  Ages,  who  made  out  that 


54    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE  HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

Egyptians  may  have  done  little  with  history  but  they  treasured 
myth  and  legend.  In  the  twentieth  century  B.C.  we  already  meet 
with  the  prototype  of  Sinbad  the  sailor.  Tales  of  wonders  wrought 
by  ancient  wise  men  and  magicians  ^  were  as  effective  then  as  now 
in  whiling  away  hours  of  leisure,  when  history  would  be  too  for- 
bidding a  discipline.  There  were  also  myths  of  origin ;  stories  of 
the  gods,  how  they  came  from  the  Holy  Land  in  the  south  country .^ 
But  as  the  centuries  passed  the  myths  got  strangely  mixed.  For 
instance,  the  misreading  of  an  inscription  on  the  tomb  of  an  early 
king  at  Abydos  led  to  a  popular  belief  that  Osiris  himself  was 
buried  there,  and  thus  started  a  new  cult.^  We  shall  find  such  local 
name-myths  again  in  the  origins  of  the  Old  Testament.  But  there 
is  no  need  to  follow  them  here  into  the  tangle  of  Egyptian  religious 
conceptions. 

If  Egypt  did  not  produce  "history"  in  our  sense  of  the  word,  it 
at  least  possessed  the  framework  for  it  in  the  Usts  of  royal  names, 
which  were  displayed  in  magnificent  profusion,  along  with  the 
reigning  monarch's  monogram  or  portrait.  Three  such  tablets,  of 
Abydos,  Sakkara,  Karnak,  may  be  mentioned  for  light  they  throw 
on  Egyptian  chronology.  In  the  first,  Seti  I,  of  the  nineteenth 
dynasty  (about  1300  B.C.),  accompanied  by  his  son  Ramses  II,  has 
before  him  seventy-five  of  his  predecessors ;  in  the  second,  Ramses 
II  has  some  forty-seven  names  on  the  list  before  him ;  ^  while  in  the 
third,  Thothmes  or  Thutmose  III  of  the  eighteenth  dynasty  is 
adoring  sixty-one.  Modern  research  has  verified  the  accuracy  of 
the  two  former  lists,  by  comparison  with  the  monuments.^  No 
wonder  the  priests  who  kept  such  lists  were  able  to  make  a  lasting 
impression  upon  the  Greek  travellers  who  were  to  come  at  a  later 
date  to  learn  from  them  the  folly  of  tracing  one's  descent  from 

both  Bible  and  Vergil  were  allegorical ;  the  Rabbis  and  many  interpreters  of  the  Koran 
have  done  the  same;  reverence  for  ancient  literary  works,  if  carried  too  far,  always 
bears  the  same  fruit."     Vide  infra,  the  section  on  allegory  in  Christian  historiography. 

'  Cf.  J.  H.  Breasted,  A  History  of  Egypt,  p.  203.  A.  Erman,  op.  cit.,  Chap.  XV. 
E.  A.  W.  Budge,  The  Literature  of  the  Ancient  Egyptians,  Chap.  X. 

^  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East,  p.  91. 

^  Ibid.,  p.  103;  cf.  J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  I,  Sect.  609. 

*  Cf.  E.  A.  W.  Budge,  A  History  of  Egypt  (8  vols.,  1902-1904),  Vol.  I,  pp.  119  sqq. 
(Tablets  of  Abydos,  Sakkara  and  Karnak  given  in  illustrations.) 

6  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  op.  ctt.,  p.  12. 


EGYPTIAN  ANNALS  55 

the  gods  in  the  sixteenth  generation.^  The  fact  that  Egypt  was 
itself  a  museum,  preserving  a  sort  of  monumental  history  of  the 
kings,  must  also  have  impressed  the  mind  with  an  enduring  sense  of 
the  past;  but  religion  rather  than  history  profited  from  such 
curiosity  as  the  spectacle  produced.  The  weight  of  authority  was 
in  the  hand  of  time. 

The  earliest  historical  record  which  has  come  down  to  us,  how- 
ever, is  a  development  from  just  such  lists  of  names.  It  is  the 
famous  Palermo  stone,  so-called  from  the  fact  that  it  is  in  the 
museum  at  Palermo,^  —  a  small  stone,  of  black  Diorite,  one  of 
the  hardest  of  stones,  only  about  seventeen  inches  high,  nine  and  a 
half  wide  and  two  and  a  half  thick.  On  this  stone,  somewhat  less 
than  two  thousand  years  before  the  oldest  parts  of  the  Old  Testament 
were  written,  Egyptian  scribes  copied  the  names  and  recorded  the 
known  facts  of  the  reigns  of  five  dynasties  before  their  time.  The 
stone  itself,  as  is  apparent  from  its  general  appearance  and  from 
the  character  of  the  text,  is  but  a  small  fragment,  broken  from  a 
larger  slab.  Egyptologists,  calculating  from  the  spaces  of  reigns 
and  their  arrangement,  have  supposed  that  the  original  was  about 
seven  feet  long  and  two  feet  high ;  but  this  is  mere  conjecture. 

The  date  when  the  annals  were  inscribed  upon  the  stone  can 
be  set  with  confidence  as  the  fifth  dynasty,  which  ruled  in  Egypt 
according  to  a  widely  accepted  reckoning,  from  2750  to  2625  B.C. 
The  portion  of  the  stone  preserved  covers  only  the  first  three  reigns 
of  that  dynasty.^ 

^  Vide  infra,  Hecataeus.  Sometimes  the  names  were  not  safe  in  the  keeping  of  a 
jealous  descendant.  Queen  Hatshepsu,  "an  Egyptian  Catherine  II,"  had  the  name 
of  her  brother,  Seti  I,  who  preceded  her,  erased  from  his  monument.  A.  Erman, 
Life  in  Ancient  Egypt,  p.  43.  Thothmes  III,  in  turn,  had  her  obelisk  walled  up.  Cf. 
J.  H.  Breasted,  A  History  of  Egypt,  pp.  282-283. 

2  A  small  fragment  of  it  is  also  at  Cairo. 

3  Although  known  to  Egyptologists  for  some  forty  years,  no  careful  studies  of  the 
Palermo  stone  were  made  before  the  twentieth  century.  The  first  reference  to  it  was 
made  in  1866  by  E.  de  Rouge  in  his  Recherches  siir  les  monuments  qii'on  pent  attrihner 
aux  six  premieres  dynasties  de  Manethon  (p.  145),  using  a  print  that  had  been  sent  him. 
The  stone  was  then  in  a  private  collection,  but  in  1877  it  passed  into  the  possession 
of  the  Museum  of  Palermo,  where  it  was  seen  by  several  Egyptologists  in  the  subse- 
quent years,  without  realizing  its  significance.  Finally,  a  study  of  it,  accompanied 
by  plates  of  the  text,  was  published  in  1896,  by  A.  Pellegrini,  in  the  Archivio  slonro 
siciliano  (New  Series,  Vol.  XX,  pp.  297-316).     Working   from  this,  the  eminent 


56    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

A  picture  of  this  fragment  from  ancient  Egypt  stands  as  frontis- 
piece to  this  volume.  Its  claim  to  such  a  place  of  honor  is  unques- 
tioned, for  it  contains  the  earliest  of  all  known  annals  in  the  history 
of  History.  Fortunately,  however,  the  illustration  in  this  case  is 
much  more  than  a  mere  picture,  for  it  offers  as  well  the  text  of  the 
original.  At  first  glance  this  may  not  seem  of  very  great  interest 
to  those  who  cannot  read  the  hieroglyphs ;  and  their  interest  is  not 
likely  to  be  quickened  when  they  learn  that  even  Egyptologists  do 
not  quite  agree  as  to  the  meaning  of  parts  of  the  text.  But  a  very 
little  study  of  the  original,  in  the  light  of  the  clues  offered  below, 
will  enable  any  one,  even  if  he  has  never  read  a  hieroglyph  before, 
to  puzzle  out  the  way  in  which  it  was  written  and  even  some  sections 
of  the  text.  There  can  be  few  more  interesting  puzzles  for  the 
student  of  history. 

At  the  top  of  the  stone  there  is  a  simple  row  of  oblong  spaces, 
with  relatively  few  signs  in  them.  The  lower  section  of  each  of 
these  furnishes  the  clue  to  their  meaning,  for  it  contains  the  sign 
for  the  king  of  lower  Egypt,  a  figure  wearing  the  red  crown  and 
holding  one  of  the  royal  insignia,  the  flail.  Consequently,  each 
symbol  in  the  space  above  must  be  the  name  of  a  king.  This 
row,  therefore,  is  the  list  of  the  names  of  early  kings  of  lower  Egypt, 
of  whose  reigns  apparently  nothing  had  come  down  to  the  scribes 

French  Egyptologist,  E.  Naville,  interpreted  the  document  as  a  "sort  of  calendar 
containing  donations  made  by  a  certain  number  of  kings  of  ancient  Egypt  and  the 
indication  of  the  feasts  to  be  celebrated."  {Les  plus  anciens  monuments  egyptiens,  in 
G.  Maspero's  Recueil  de  travaux  relatifs  d  la  philologie  et  d  I'archeologie  egyptiennes  et 
assyriennes,  Vol.  XXI  (1899),  pp.  112  sq.)  In  1899,  however,  Naville  visited  Palermo 
and  collated  the  text,  publishing  the  results  —  with  plates  —  in  1903,  in  the  same 
series  (Vol.  XXV,  or  Vol.  IX  of  the  new  series).  There  his  conclusion  was  that  it  was 
a  fragment  of  religious  annals,  probably  drawn  up  by  the  priests  of  Heliopolis,  "of 
which  the  chronology,  at  least  in  the  first  part,  appears  to  depend  upon  the  periods 
or  cycles  which  do  not  correspond  with  the  reigns  of  the  kings"  (p.  81).  Meanwhile 
an  even  more  detailed  study  had  been  undertaken  by  the  German  scholars  H.  Schafer, 
L.  Borchardt  and  K.  Sethe,  the  general  conclusions  of  which  appeared  in  1902  under 
the  title  Ein  Bruchstiick  altdgy ptischer  Annalen,  in  the  Abhandlungen  der  kmiglichen 
preussischen  Akademie  der  Wissenschaftcn  {Philosophische  und  historische  Classe),  for 
1902,  with  excellent  photographic  plates  of  the  original.  J.  H.  Breasted's  translation, 
in  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  I,  pp.  51-72,  is  based  mainly  upon  Schafer's  text. 
A  photographic  plate  of  the  front  face  of  the  stone  is  also  given  in  Breasted's  History 
of  Egypt,  facing  p.  46. 

The  present  text  is  drawn  from  Breasted's  and  Schafer's,  rearranged  somewhat 
for  purposes  of  clarity. 


EGYPTIAN   ANNALS  57 

of  the  fifth  dynasty  but  the  royal  names  themselves.  In  any  case, 
no  events  are  recorded.  It  should  be  noted  here  that  these,  like 
all  Egyptian  hieroglyphs,  are  to  be  read  from  right  to  left. 

With  the  second  row  or  series,  however,  one  comes  upon  entirely 
different  data.  The  dividing  lines,  curling  over  at  the  top,  are 
themselves  the  hieroglyphic  signs  of  palms,  signifying  years.  If 
one  looks  carefully  one  can  see  a  short  cross-mark  on  each  one, 
about  three  quarters  of  the  way  up  the  stem,  which  definitely 
establishes  their  meaning.^  But  in  a  few  instances  the  line  is  also 
run  straight  up,  through  the  intervening  long  parallel  space,  the 
series  above.  These  long  straight  lines  are  taken  to  indicate  the 
close  of  reigns,  and  are  accompanied  by  some  specific  reckoning, 
as  may  very  well  be  seen  by  glancing  a  moment  at  the  spaces  on 
each  side  of  the  first  one.  On  the  right  of  it  one  can  easily  dis- 
tinguish six  new-moons,  one  above  the  other,  which  mean  six  months, 
and  a  circle  representing  the  sun  and  seven  strokes,  which  indicate 
seven  days.  On  the  other  side  of  the  vertical  line  one  sees  four 
months  and  thirteen  days,  —  the  symbol  for  ten  being  the  two 
strokes  joined  at  the  top  instead  of  crossed  as  in  Roman  counting. 
Consequently,  here  is  obviously  some  detail  as  to  the  time  when 
the  reign  ceased.  The  name  of  the  king  is  given  in  the  long  hori- 
zontal space  above  the  yearly  records,  although  only  two  such  are 
visible  on  this  side  of  the  fragment,  one  at  the  extreme  right  above 
the  third  row,  and  the  other  at  the  left  above  the  fourth  row. 

The  measurements  in  the  little  square  below  each  yearly  record 
are  supposed  to  register  the  height  of  the  Nile  flood.  The  fore- 
arm represents  a  cubit,  the  other  indications  stand  for  hands  and 
finger-lengths. 

The  general  character  of  the  material  here  preserved  is  of  great 
interest,  however  one  may  regard  the  details;  for  on  this  little 
block  of  stone  one  can  see  how  history  grows  out  of  the  thin  data  of 
the  earliest  lists.  At  first  there  are  only  rows  of  unknown  kings, 
mere  names,  and  even  these  of  strange  archaic  sound .^    It  is  sup- 

1  This  was  not  apparent  in  Pellegrini's  plates,  but  is  clearly  brought  out  in  those 
of  Schafer  and  Naville. 

^  The  first  line  reads :  -pu ;  Seka ;  Khayn ;  Teyew ;  Thesh ;  etc.  It  should  be 
recalled  that  the  text  is  read  from  right  to  left.  The  vocalization  is  that  adopted  by 
Breasted ;  the  Egyptian  alphabet  noted  only  the  consonants.*- 


58    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

posed  that  the  lost  portion  may  have  contained  the  kings  of  upper 
Egypt  or  a  list  of  the  gods.  Then,  in  the  second  line  we  come 
upon  the  story  of  a  reign  of  the  first  dynasty,  giving  the  events 
year  by  year. 

This  first  of  all  annals  reads  as  follows  : 

"Year  i     Fourth  month ;  thirteenth  day.^     Union  of  the  two  lands.     Circuit 
of  the  wall. 
Six  cubits  [the  height  of  the  Nile.] 

2  Worship  of  Horus.2     Festival  of  Desher. 

3  Birth  of  two  children  to  the  King  of  Lower  Egjrpt. 
Four  cubits,  one  palm. 

4  Worship  of  Horus ;  [undeciphered]. 

5  [Plan]  of  the  House,  'Mighty  of  the  Gods.'     Feast  of  Sokar. 
Five  cubits,  five  palms,  one  finger. 

6  Worship  of  Horus.     Birth  of  the  goddess  Yamet. 
Five  cubits,  one  palm. 

7  Appearance  [or  coronation]  of  the  King  of  Upper  Egypt. 
Birth  of  Min. 

Five  cubits. 

8  Worship  of  Horus. 
Birth  of  Anubis. 

Six  cubits,  one  palm. 

9  First  appearance  of  the  Festival  of  Zet. 
Four  cubits,  one  span. 

lo    [Destroyed.]  "  ^ 

These  are  still  mainly  the  data  of  religion,  —  festivals  of  the 
gods  and  scraps  of  divine  history.  The  chief  human  activity  is  the 
building  of  temples.  In  the  fourth  line,  however,  we  come  upon 
the  second  dynasty,  and  the  items  recorded  steadily  grow  more 
secular.     We  even  come  upon  the  regular  system  of  the  numbering 

^  Date  of  the  king's  accession.  The  remainder  of  the  year,  which  has  been  inter- 
rupted by  the  death  of  the  last  king.  On  this  day  the  new  king  ascends  the  throne. 
Note  the  upright  line  dividing  the  reigns.  The  new  king's  name  was  apparently 
farther  to  the  left,  and  is  lost. 

2  Celebrated  every  two  years. 

'  Proceeding  upon  the  assumption  that  the  king's  name  was  placed  over  the  middle 
years  of  his  reign,  and  that  it  would  itself  spread  over  sLx  others,  Schafer  (p.  187) 
reckons  that  since  this  king's  name  is  not  yet  reached  in  the  ten  years  here  shown,  he 
must  have  reigned  at  least  sixteen  years  more ;  and  the  stone  extended  at  least  that 
far  to  the  left.  Similarly  the  king  whose  name  occurs  at  the  extreme  right  of  the 
next  line  must  have  already  reigned  as  long  as  the  period  shown  here  (13  years  +  5 
for  the  name,  or  18  in  all). 


EGYPTIAN  ANNALS  59 

of  the  land  and  its  resources,  which  may  be  viewed,  if  one  so  wishes, 
as  the  earhest  trace  of  economic  history.^  It  is  not  until  the  third 
dynasty,  however,  on  the  last  line  of  the  fragment,  that  the  annal  be- 
comes at  all  detailed.  The  story  depicted  in  the  three  years  here 
preserved  runs  as  follows  : 

"  Building  of  the  loo-cubit  dewatowe  ships  of  meru  wood,  and  of  60  sixteen 
[oared?]  barges  of  the  king.  Hacking  up  of  the  land  of  the  negro.  Bringing 
of  7,000  Hving  prisoners,  and  200,000  large  and  small  cattle.  Building  of  the 
wall  of  the  Southland  and  Northland  [called]  'Houses  of  Snefru.'  Bringing 
of  40  ships  filled  with  cedar  wood.^ 

"Making  35  houses  ...  of  122  cattle.  Building  of  a  loo-cubit  dewatowe 
ship  of  cedar  wood  and  two  loo-cubit  ships  of  meru  wood.  Seventh  occurrence 
of  the  numbering. 

"Five  cubits,  one  palm,  one  finger. 

"  Erection  of '  Exalted  is  the  white  crown  of  Snefru  upon  the  Southern  Gate ' 
[and]  'Exalted  is  the  red  crown  of  Snefru  upon  the  Northern  Gate.'^  Mak- 
ing the  doors  of  the  king's  palace  of  cedar  wood. 

"Two  cubits,  two  palms,  two  and  three-fourths  fingers." 

The  inscriptions  on  the  reverse  continue  the  story,  through  part 
of  the  fourth  dynasty  and  of  the  three  first  reigns  of  the  fifth  dynasty. 
The  detail  is  much  richer  here,  but  the  condition  of  this  face  of  the 
stone  is  so  bad  as  to  render  decipherment  very  difiicult,  and  the  mere 
fact  that  the  material  is  richer  on  each  reign  limits  the  scribe  to 
fewer  reigns.  As  a  result  interest  in  these  sections  of  the  annals 
hardly  extends  beyond  Egyptologists,  and  further  comment  may 
be  omitted  here. 

So  slight  a  chronicle,  even  if  it  be  the  first,  seems  hardly  worth 
delaying  over,  were  it  not  that  we  have  the  original  text  before  us, 
and  that  its  very  slightness  tempts  one  to  linger.  There  must  have 
been  many  such  simple,  monastic  products  as  this  in  the  possession 
of  the  priests  of  Egypt ;  but  it  is  hardly  to  be  wondered  at  that  it 
needed  the  best  of  stone  to  preserve  them,  for  there  is  little  enough 
in  the  text  itself  to  enforce  immortality.     More  human  interest 

^In  the  third  space  from  the  right  of  the  fourth  line.  It  reads  "Worship  of 
Horns.  Fourth  numbering.  Four  cubits,  two  fingers."  Since  this  numbering  took 
place  every  other  year,  and  this  is  the  fourth  numbering  for  this  king,  the  reign  prob- 
ably began  seven  years  earlier. 

2  An  expedition  by  sea  to  Lebanon. 

3  The  names  of  two  gates  or  parts  of  the  palace  of  Snefru.  Cf.  J.  H.  Breasted, 
Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  I,  p.  66  n.c. 


6o    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

attaches  to  the  records  of  single  reigns,  in  which  the  royal  scribe 
has  every  incentive  to  tell  a  striking  story,  and  dress  it  up  in  all 
the  detail  of  actuality.  Such  records  are  less  "historic"  than  the 
dry-as-dust  chronicle  we  have  just  been  examining,  but  they  are  at 
least  of  livelier  interest  for  the  modern  reader. 

There  is  a  large  number  of  these.  They  form  the  bulk  of  the 
great  collection  of  Professor  Breasted's  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt. 
It  will  suffice  to  take  as  an  example  the  most  notable  of  these,  the 
"annals"  of  the  great  monarch  of  the  imperial  period,  Thothmes 
or  Thutmose  III.^  As  the  Palermo  stone  is  the  first,  this  is  "the 
longest  and  most  important  historical  inscription  in  Egypt."  ^  It 
was  written  by  the  king's  command  on  the  walls  of  "the  corridor 
which  surrounds  the  granite  holy  of  holies  of  the  great  Karnak 
temple  of  Amon,"  ^  and  describes  some  seventeen  campaigns  which 
he  carried  on,  year  after  year,  as  he  maintained  the  sovereignty  of 
Egypt  over  western  Asia.  The  most  noteworthy  of  these  was 
that  in  which  the  king  met  and  defeated  the  forces  of  Syria  at 
Armageddon,  or  Megiddo ;  and  so  detailed  is  the  account  of  this 
exploit  that  modern  historians  are  able  to  reconstruct  the  strategy 
according  to  the  map  and  to  follow  the  story  day  by  day.  The 
description  of  the  battle  itself,  which  has  just  a  touch  of  something 
Homeric  in  it,  is  as  follows :  ^ 

"Then  the  tents  of  His  Majesty  were  pitched,  and  orders  were  sent  out  to 
the  whole  army,  saying,  Arm  yourselves,  get  your  weapons  ready,  for  we  shall 
set  out  to  do  battle  with  the  miserable  enemy  at  daybreak.  The  king  sat  in 
his  tent,  the  ofl&cers  made  their  preparations,  and  the  rations  of  the  servants 
were  provided.  The  military  sentries  went  about  crying,  Be  firm  of  heart, 
Be  firm  of  heart.  Keep  watch,  keep  watch.  Keep  watch  over  the  life  of  the 
king  in  his  tent.  And  a  report  was  brought  to  His  Majesty  that  the  country 
was  quiet,  and  that  the  foot  soldiers  of  the  south  and  north  were  ready.  On 
the  twenty-first  day  of  the  first  month  of  the  season  Shemu  (March-April) 
of  the  twenty-third  year  of  the  reign  of  His  Majesty,  and  the  day  of  the  festival 
of  the  new  moon,  which  was  also  the  anniversary  of  the  king's  coronation,  at 
dawn,  behold,  the  order  was  given  to  set  the  whole  army  in  motion.    His 

1  The  spelling  of  Egyptian  names  is  not  standardized  yet,  owing  to  the  absence 
of  vowels  in  the  hieroglyphs. 

2  J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  II,  pp.  163  sqq.    It  is  223  lines  long. 
'  Ibid.,  note. 

*  Translation  of  E.  A.  W.  Budge,  The  Literature  of  the  Ancient  Egyptians,  pp.  104- 
105.    Cf.  also  J.  H.  Breasted,  op.  cit.,  Vol.  II,  p.  184,  Sect.  430, 


EGYPTIAN   ANNALS  6i 

Majesty  set  out  in  his  chariot  of  silver-gold,  and  he  had  girded  on  himself  the 
weapons  of  battle,  like  Horus  the  Slayer,  the  lord  of  might,  and  he  was  like 
unto  Menthu  [the  War-god]  of  Thebes,  and  Amen  his  father  gave  strength  to 
his  arms.  The  southern  half  of  the  army  was  stationed  on  a  hill  to  the  south 
of  the  stream  Kina,  and  the  northern  half  lay  to  the  south-west  of  Megiddo. 
His  Majesty  was  between  them,  and  Amen  was  protecting  him  and  giving 
strength  to  his  body.  His  Majesty  at  the  head  of  his  army  attacked  his  enemies, 
and  broke  their  line,  and  when  they  saw  that  he  was  overwhelming  them  they 
broke  and  fled  to  Megiddo  in  a  panic,  leaving  their  horses  and  their  gold  and 
silver  chariots  on  the  field.  [The  fugitives]  were  pulled  up  by  the  people  over 
the  walls  into  the  city ;  now  they  let  down  their  clothes  by  which  to  pull  them 
up.  If  the  soldiers  of  His  Majesty  had  not  devoted  themselves  to  securing 
loot  of  the  enemy,  they  would  have  been  able  to  capture  the  city  of  Megiddo 
at  the  moment  when  the  vile  foes  from  Kadesh  and  the  vile  foes  from  this  city 
were  being  dragged  up  hurriedly  over  the  walls  into  this  city;  for  the  terror 
of  His  Majesty  had  entered  into  them,  and  their  arms  dropped  helplessly,  and 
the  serpent  on  his  crown  overthrew  them." 

Tlie  scribe  who  thus  graphically  describes  the  flight  to  Megiddo 
evidently  repeats  a  royal  regret  at  the  delay  of  the  Egyptians  to 
plunder  the  enemy,  for  he  devotes  the  whole  of  the  next  section 
to  a  description  of  the  spoil.  Indeed,  as  Breasted  remarks,  being  a 
priest,  he  is  really  more  interested  in  the  booty  than  in  the  strategy, 
because  the  booty  fell  largely  to  the  temples.  Hence  the  annals 
as  set  forth  "are  little  more  than  an  introduction  to  hsts  of  feasts 
and  offerings,"  ^  which  cover  adjoining  walls  of  the  temple.^  Fortu- 
nately, however,  he  preserves  the  source  of  his  narrative,  showing 
that  it  was  taken  from  the  daily  record  kept  by  the  secretaries  of 
Thutmose  III,  a  copy  of  which,  made  on  a  roll  of  leather,  was  pre- 
served in  the  temple  of  Amon.^  The  temple  inscription  was,  there- 
fore, an  excerpt  from  a  sort  of  royal  journal,  arranged  and  chosen 
"as  a  record  for  the  future,"  ^  a  conscious  effort  at  current  history 
in  the  grand  style,  in  keeping  with  the  theme  and  place.  What- 
ever the  daily  journal  of  the  king  amounted  to,  the  ofhcial  in  charge 
of  it  was  no  mean  dignitary ;  and  by  a  strange  chance  one  of  them 

*  J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  II,  p.  i66. 

^  Ibid.,  p.  218. 

'Ibid.,  Sects.  391,  392,  433  Sect.  392,  "Now  all  that  his  majesty  did  to  this 
city  [Megiddo],  to  that  wretched  foe  and  his  wretched  army  was  recorded  on  each 
day  by  its  name,  under  the  title  of  [title  not  deciphered].  [Then  it  was]  recorded 
upon  a  roll  of  leather  in  the  temple  of  Amon  to  this  day." 

^  Ibid.,  Sect.  568 ;  cf.  Sect.  392. 


62     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

has  left  in  the  epitaph  on  his  tomb  by  Thebes  an  indication  that  it 
was  he  —  Thaneni  by  name  —  who  followed  Thutmose  on  his  cam- 
paigns and  wrote  the  original  record,  to  which  the  inscription  refers.^ 

It  is  unnecessary  here  to  delay  long  over  annals  of  this  kind. 
Their  detailed  study  belongs  to  the  history  of  Egypt  rather  than  to 
such  a  survey  as  this.  Although  here  and  there  one  comes  upon 
notable  passages,  particularly  in  the  descriptive  sections  that  deal 
with  the  administration  of  the  realm,^  we  are  not  yet,  strictly  speak- 
ing, dealing  with  historical  hterature,  but  with  semi-reHgious,  semi- 
biographical  epitaphs,  intended,  like  the  monuments  on  which  they 
were  inscribed,  to  preserve  the  glory  of  the  present  for  the  future, 
not  to  rescue  a  past  from  oblivion.  Their  existence,  however,  made 
the  latter  possible  so  long  as  the  hieroglyphs  could  be  read ;  and 
Herodotus  shows  us  how  the  scribes  and  priests  could  profit  from 
living  in  such  pictured  archives  as  their  temples  had  become,  as 
well  as  from  the  treasures  in  their  keeping.  So,  to  some  extent,  they 
kept  the  long  perspective  open. 

Finally,  in  the  early  third  century  B.C.,  when  the  history  of 
Egypt  was  already  ancient,  a  priest  and  scribe  set  down  in  Greek 
the  Hsts  of  pharaohs,  through  all  the  centuries.  Manetho,  this  one 
Egyptian  historian  of  Egypt  of  whom  we  know,  was  no  mean  scholar. 
He  shows,  by  comparison  with  the  monuments  now  discovered, 
that  he  had  at  his  disposal  relatively  accurate  and  adequate  data 
for  a  suggestive  outline  without  a  rival  in  any  antique  narrative 

^  The  inscription  runs  as  follows  (J.  H.  Breasted,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol. 
n,  p.  165) : 

"I  followed  the  Good  God,  Sovereign  of  Truth,  King  of  Upper  and  Lower  Egypt, 
Menkheperre  (Thutmose  III) ;  I  beheld  the  victories  of  the  king  which  he  won  in 
every  country.  He  brought  the  chiefs  of  Zahi  as  living  prisoners  to  'Eg-ypt ;  he  cap- 
tured all  their  cities;  he  cut  down  their  groves;  no  country  remained.  ...  I  re- 
corded the  victories  which  he  won  in  every  land,  putting  (them)  into  writing  according 
to  the  facts." 

'  Note  particularly  the  fine  account  of  the  state  of  Eg>'pt  under  Ramses  III,  in 
E.  A.  W.  Budge,  The  Literature  of  the  Ancient  Egyptians,  p.  114;  J.  H.  Breasted, 
Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  IV,  Sect.  410.  Attention  might  also  be  called  to  the 
famous  Punt  Reliefs,  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt,  Vol.  II,  pp.  102  sqq.  J.  H.  Breasted, 
A  History  of  Egypt,  pp.  274-278.  A.  Erman,  Life  in  Ancient  Egypt,  pp.  510  sqq.,  etc. 
The  richness  of  these  records  kept  up  to  the  last.  For  a  description  of  Egypt  under 
the  Ptolemies  see  The  Tebtunis  Papyri  (2  vols.,  1902-1907),  edited  by  B.  G.  Grenfell 
and  A,  S.  Hunt. 


EGYPTIAN  ANNALS  63 

for  the  length  of  time  it  covers.  Unfortunately,  we  can  judge  of 
his  work  only  by  the  fragments  which  it  suited  Josephus,  the  Jewish 
historian,  to  preserve,  and  by  the  epitomes  used  by  the  Christian 
chroniclers,  Julius  Africanus  and  Eusebius.^  Judged  by  the  latter, 
which  is  hardly  fair,  he  seems  to  have  made  it  his  chief  aim  to  secure 
correct  lists  of  the  pharaohs,  coming  like  a  careful  mathematician 
to  add  up  the  items  in  the  long  lists  now  practically  closed.^  In 
doing  this  he  left  a  device,  which  Egyptologists  still  find  of  use; 
he  divided  the  names  into  groups  or  Dynasties,  —  the  familiar 
divisions  of  today .^  What  we  have  in  the  Christian  chronologies 
is  apparently  rather  a  reflection  of  their  interest  in  Egyptian  history 
than  that  of  Manetho.  The  same  is  true  of  Josephus ;  but  fortu- 
nately it  suited  his  purpose,  in  his  defence  of  Jewish  historiography, 
to  quote  from  Manetho  suiB&ciently  to  give  us  an  idea  —  though  only 
one  —  of  the  extent  to  which  the  work  measures  up  to  the  standards 
of  history.  It  is  best  to  quote  the  opening  section  of  Josephus' 
reference,  in  which  he  adduces  Manetho  to  prove  that  the  Hyksos 
were  the  Hebrews :  ^ 

"  Manetho  was  a  man  who  was  by  race  an  Egyptian,  but  had  made  himself 
master  of  the  Greek  learning,  as  is  very  evident ;  for  he  wrote  the  history  of  his 
own  country  in  the  Greek  tongue,  translating  it,  as  he  himself  says,  out  of  their 
sacred  records  :  he  also  finds  great  fault  with  Herodotus  for  having  given  through 
ignorance  false  accounts  of  Egyptian  affairs.  Now  this  Manetho,  in  the  second 
book  of  his  Egyptian  history,^  writes  concerning  us  in  the  following  manner.  I 
shall  set  down  his  very  words,  as  if  I  were  producing  the  very  man  himself  as  a 
witness. 

"  '  There  was  a  king  of  ours  whose  name  was  Timaus,  in  whose  reign  it  came 
to  pass,  I  know  not  why,  that  God  was  displeased  with  us,  and  there  came  un- 
expectedly men  of  ignoble  birth  out  of  the  eastern  parts,  who  had  boldness 
enough  to  make  an  expedition  into  our  country,  and  easily  subdued  it  by  force 

^  The  fragments  of  Manetho  are  not  readily  accessible.  The  best  source  is  I.  P. 
Cory's  Ancient  Fragments  of  Phceuician,  Chaldcean,  Egyptian,  .  .  .  and  Other  Writers 
(2d  ed.,  1832),  where  text  and  translation  are  given  as  preserved  in  fragmentary  form. 
Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East,  p.  13. 

2  Note  especially  the  correspondence,  in  the  main,  with  the  famous  Turin 
papyrus,  a  list  of  great  importance  to  Egyptologists. 

^  Whether  he  took  it  over  from  his  sources  or  not,  we  get  it  from  him. 

*  Josephus,  Against  Apion,  Book  I,  Sect.  14.  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  op.  cit.,  pp.  13,  213, 
and  the  section  from  Josephus  below. 

6  AiyvwTiaxd,  the  title  of  Manetho's  work. 


64    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

without  a  battle.  And  when  they  had  got  our  riders  under  their  power,  they 
afterwards  savagely  burnt  down  our  cities,  and  demoUshed  the  temples  of  the 
gods,  and  used  all  the  inhabitants  in  a  most  hostile  manner,  for  they  slew  some, 
and  led  the  children  and  wives  of  others  into  slavery.  At  length  they  made 
one  of  themselves  king,  whose  name  was  Salatis.  And  he  lived  at  Memphis, ^ 
and  made  both  upper  and  lower  Egypt  pay  tribute,  and  left  garrisons  in  places 
that  were  most  suitable  for  them.  And  he  made  the  eastern  parts  especially 
strong,  as  he  foresaw  that  the  Assyrians,  who  had  then  the  greatest  power, 
would  covet  their  kingdom,  and  invade  them.  And  as  he  found  in  the  noma 
of  Sais  a  city  very  fit  for  his  purpose  (which  lay  east  of  the  arm  of  the  Nile 
near  Bubastis,  and  with  regard  to  a  theological  notion  was  caUed  Auaris),  he 
rebuilt  it,  and  made  it  very  strong  by  the  walls  he  built  round  it,  and  by  a  nu- 
merous garrison  of  two  hundred  and  forty  thousand  armed  men  whom  he  put 
into  it  to  keep  it.  There  Salatis  went  every  summer,  partly  to  gather  in  his 
corn,  and  pay  his  soldiers  their  wages,  and  partly  to  train  his  armed  men  and 
so  to  awe  foreigners.  When  he  had  reigned  nineteen  years  he  died.  After 
him  reigned  another,  whose  name  was  Beon,  for  forty-four  years.  After 
him  reigned  another,  called  Apachnas,  thirty-six  years  and  seven  months. 
After  him  Apophis  reigned  sixty-one  years,  and  then  Janias  fifty  years  and 
one  month.  After  all  these  reigned  Assis  forty-nine  years  and  two  months. 
And  these  six  were  the  fiirst  rulers  among  them  who  were  very  desirous 
to  pluck  up  Egypt  by  the  roots.  Their  whole  nation  was  called  Hycsos, 
that  is  shepherd-kings;  for  Hyc  according  to  the  sacred  dialect  denotes  a  king, 
as  does  Sos  a  shepherd  and  shepherds  in  the  ordinary  dialect,  and  of  these  is 
compounded  Hycsos.    But  some  say  that  these  people  were  Arabians.'" 

From  this  extract,  which  contains  the  greater  part  of  the  text 
preserved  by  Josephus,  one  can  judge  the  character  of  the  Egyptian 
history  of  Manetho.  It  seems  to  have  been  a  respectable  perform- 
ance, a  work  of  wide  scholarship,  extending  over  a  comparative 
study  of  the  rich  materials  that  lay  open  to  the  men  of  the  Hellenic 
age ;  the  kind  of  history  one  might  welcome  to  the  reference  shelves 
of  the  great  library  at  Alexandria.  But  whatever  the  content,  the 
enterprise  was  apparently  less  Egyptian  than  Hellenic. 

In  conclusion,  it  may  be  remarked  that  if  the  text  of  Manetho 
is  as  good  as  this  in  the  part  that  deals  with  the  history  of  the 
Hyksos,  it  probably  reached  still  greater  excellence  in  the  more 
purely  Egyptian  theme  of  the  great  days  of  the  Empire,  for  which 
ample  materials  were  at  hand.  The  critic  of  Herodotus  may  there- 
fore fairly  claim  the  title  of  the  one  historian  of  Egypt. 

» C/.  Josephus,  The  Wars  oj  the  Jews,  BL  I,  Chap.  IX,  Sect  4. 


EGYPTIAN   ANNALS  65 

Such,  in  short,  is  the  history  of  History  of  Egypt.  The  student 
will  find  much  of  interest  as  he  turns  to  that  vast  descriptive  litera- 
ture which  modern  scholars  have  now  deciphered.  But  there  are 
no  signs  of  anything  comparable  to  their  own  work;  no  mastery 
of  time  perspectives  and  source  criticism  such  as  is  now  demanded 
of  every  one  who  attempts  to  recast  the  ancient  story. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  works  of  J.  H.  Breasted  have  been  constantly  used  in  this  chapter.  In 
addition  to  his  well  known  History  of  Egypt  (2d  ed.,  1909)  and  his  shorter 
History  of  the  Ancient  Egyptians  (1908),  with  good  selected  bibliography,  his 
general  surveys  in  Ancient  Times  (1916),  and  the  Development  of  Religion  and 
Thought  in  Ancient  Egypt  (1912),  the  collection  of  historical  texts,  in  EngHsh 
translation.  Ancient  Records  of  Egypt  (5  vols.,  1906-1907)  contain  material 
which  is  readily  usable  as  illustrative  of  the  text,  by  any  thoughtful  reader. 
The  finely  illustrated  Reports  of  the  Egyptian  Exploration  Fund  should  be 
referred  to,  if  available,  for  the  graphic  quality  of  their  texts.  The  History  of 
Egypt  by  Flinders  Petrie,  although  revised  in  process  of  publication,  follows 
a  chronological  scheme  now  generally  not  accepted.  More  elaborate  is  the 
History  of  Egypt  by  E.  A.  W.  Budge  (8  vols.,  1902-1904),  while  the  best  general 
description  of  Egyptian  society  is  that  of  A.  Erman,  translated  as  Life  in 
Ancient  Egypt  (1894).  The  works  of  G.  Maspero  (also  translated)  contain 
much  suggestive  material.  The  articles  on  Egypt  in  the  Encyclopcedia  Britan- 
nica  are  especially  valuable,  with  good  bibliographies ;  and  there  is  a  valua- 
ble Introduction  in  Budge's  elaborate  Egyptian  Hieroglyphic  Dictionary  (1920). 
But  the  student  of  historiography  is  indebted  most  to  Professor  Breasted. 


CHAPTER  VI 

BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND   PERSIAN  RECORDS 

The  art  of  writing  in  cuneiform  —  making  wedge-shaped  marks 
in  clay  by  means  of  a  reed  —  was  developed  as  early  as  the  fourth 
millennium  B.C.  by  the  people  who  lived  in  the  mud  flats  and  among 
the  reedy  marshes  of  the  lower  Euphrates.  They  were  not  Semites, 
like  the  nomads  of  the  desert  to  the  west,  but  "  Sumerians,"  a  strange 
Asiatic  people,  living  mainly  in  towns  and  engaged  already  in 
business  or  in  truck-farming  where  dikes  secured  that  most  fertile 
soil.  History,  in  that  part  of  the  world,  dawns  for  us,  —  since  the 
rise  of  modern  archaeology,  —  with  the  scratches  of  those  early 
scribes,  noting  the  sales  of  a  merchant,  the  title  to  a  plot  of  land 
or  some  such  item  of  current  business,  or  a  religious  text.  For, 
not  only  has  time  preserved  many  a  hardened  lump  of  clay,  which 
served  them  for  book  and  paper ;  but  also,  the  art  of  writing  itself 
was  never  lost,  through  all  the  changing  civilizations  which  fol- 
lowed each  other  on  the  soil  of  Babylonia.^  Indeed  it  remained 
one  of  the  fundamentals  in  Mesopotamian  culture ;  an  essential 
in  the  transaction  of  business  and  of  government.  From  the  days 
when  Hammurabi  dictated  his  despatches  and  had  his  laws  in- 
scribed, to  the  closing  of  the  Persian  era,  the  little  lumps  of  clay, 
baked  and  sealed,  were  as  important  instruments  in  carrying  on 
affairs  as  the  armies  of  the  kings  or  the  goods  of  the  merchants. 
And  if  the  devices  of  literacy  helped  to  hold  the  Mesopotamian 
world  together,  they  also  united  the  centuries.  Libraries  preserved 
the  tablets  by  scores  and  hundreds,  and  scholars  copied  the  classical 
ones  or  those  their  royal  patrons  were  interested  in.  In  short,  from 
a  time  so  remote  that  it  was  almost  as  far  away  to  the  Persians  as 
to  us,  through  three  millenniums  at  least,  the  people  of  Babylonia- 
Assyria  kept  producing  and  studying  the  data  of  history;  yet 
the  thing  itself  they  never  produced.- 

*  Cf.  S.  P.  Handcock,  Mesopotamian  ArckcBology  (1912),  Chap.  IV. 
^  Berossos  had  Greek  antecedents. 

66 


BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND  PERSIAN  RECORDS     67 

The  history  of  History  in  Babylonia  is  very  similar  to  that  in 
Egypt,  so  similar  that  we  do  not  need  to  delay  long  over  the  de- 
tails. But  there  is  an  added  significance  in  the  failure  of  Babylonia ; 
for  it  did  develop  the  two  elements  which  are  the  essentials  in  his- 
torical production :  a  curiosity  about  the  origin  of  things  which 
resulted  in  a  mythical  literature  that  has  been  of  lasting  importance 
in  religion ;  and  a  care  for  the  texts  of  the  past,  which  is  the  first 
step  toward  historical  criticism.  Had  criticism  supervened,  we 
should  have  had  genuine  history.  But  criticism  presupposes 
skepticism ;  and  in  Babylon  as  in  Egypt,  religion  —  or  super- 
stition —  blocked  the  way  to  science. 

The  myths  of  Babylon  have  a  personal  interest  for  us,  not  so 
much  on  account  of  what  they  contain  as  on  account  of  their  subse- 
quent history.  Preserved  and  transformed  by  the  Jews,  they  be- 
came the  basis  of  our  own  story  of  the  origin  of  things ;  and  when 
the  originals  were  found  and  deciphered,  only  a  few  years  ago,  the 
controversies  which  they  aroused  passed  the  frontiers  of  either 
science  or  religion,  as  the  very  foundations  of  biblical  faith  seemed 
shaken.  Here,  however,  we  have  no  theological  problems  to  solve, 
and  must  limit  ourselves  to  considering  them  in  their  own  time  and 
setting,  although  it  must  be  admitted  that,  were  it  not  for  their 
later  use,  we  should  hardly  be  tempted  to  do  so,  seeing  that  we 
passed  by  in  silence  the  Pyramid  texts  of  Egypt,  with  a  content 
intrinsically  not  less  significant.^  But  the  coming  of  Osiris,  however 
much  it  contributed  to  that  process  of  intricate  and  subtle  syncretism 
which  tinged  with  wistful  hope  and  moral  purpose  the  Greco- 
Roman  world  in  early  Christian  days,  did  not  enter  into  the  fabric 
of  Jewish  belief  as  did  the  Babylonian  stories  of  Creation  and  the 
Flood,  and  so  its  conscious  influence  in  western  thought  is  not  to  be 
compared  with  theirs. 

The  myth  of  Creation  -  as  preserved  on  seven  tablets,  is  long 
and  involved,  with  much  repetition ;  but  the  parts  of  interest  for 

^  See  J.  H.  Breasted's  analysis  in  Development  of  Religion  and  Thought  in  Ancient 
Egypt. 

2  On  these  Babylonian  myths  see  R.  W.  Rogers,  Cuneiform  Parallels  to  the  Old 
Testament  (191 2)  with  bibliographies.  Of  the  works  mentioned  there  see  especially 
those  of  L.  W.  King,  The  Seven  Tablets  of  Creation  (2  vols.,  1902). 


68    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

comparison  with  the  story  in  Genesis  are  only  a  few  lines.  It 
begins  with  the  creation  of  the  gods  themselves. 

"When  above  the  heaven  was  not  named, 
And  beneath  the  earth  bore  no  name, 
And  the  primeval  Apsu,  who  begat  them. 
And  Mummu  and  Tiamat,  the  mother  of  them  all,  — 
Their  waters  were  mingled  together, 
And  no  field  was  formed,  no  marsh  seen. 
When  no  one  of  the  gods  had  been  called  into  being, 
And  none  bore  a  name,  and  no  destinies  [were  fixed]. 
Then  were  created  the  gods  in  the  midst  of  [heaven]."  * 

Then  comes  a  struggle  between  Tiamat,  dragon  of  darkness  and 
disorder,  and  the  champion  of  the  parent  god  Anshar,  who  was 
Ea  when  the  tale  was  told  in  Eridu,  Marduli  when  it  was  told  in 
Babylon.  The  text  rises  to  fine  epic  quality  as  it  describes  the  hero 
advancing  to  the  combat. 

"He  made  ready  the  bow,  appointed  it  as  his  weapon, 
He  seized  a  spear,  he  fastened  .  .  . 
He  raised  the  club,  in  his  right  hand  he  grasped  it, 
The  bow  and  the  quiver  he  hung  at  his  side. 
He  put  the  lightning  in  front  of  him. 
With  flaming  fire  he  fiUed  his  body."  ^ 

It  was  only  after  Tiamat's  body  was  cut,  so  that  one  half  made 
heaven  and  the  other  half  the  earth,  that  Marduk  determined  to 
create  plants  and  animals,  and  man.^ 

"When  Marduk  heard  the  word  of  the  gods, 
His  heart  moved  him  and  he  devised  a  cunning  plan. 
He  opened  his  mouth  and  unto  Ea  he  spoke. 

That  which  he  had  conceived  in  his  heart,  he  made  known  imto  him: 
'  My  blood  will  I  take  and  bone  will  I  fashion, 
I  shall  make  man  that  man  may  .  .  . 
I  shall  create  man  who  shall  inhabit  the  earth, 
Let  the  worship  of  the  gods  be  estabhshed,  let  their  shrines  be  built.'" 

There   is  also  the   legend   of   a   certain  Adapa  —  or   perhaps 
Adamu  "*  —  who  is  cautioned  by  his  father  Ea  not  to  eat  or  drink 

^  R.  W.  Rogers,  Cuneiform  Parallels  to  the  Old  Testament,  p.  3. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  26. 

^Ibid.,  Sixth  tablet,  11.  1-8,  p.  36. 

*  Ibid.,  pp.  67  sq. 


BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND  PERSIAN  RECORDS     69 

of  the  food  the  gods  will  provide  him,  and  by  obeying  —  not  by 
disobeying  —  he  misses  eternal  life.  This  Adam  is  not  a  first  man 
but  a  god  who  breaks  the  wings  of  the  south  wind.  It  is  a  pretty 
story,  even  in  the  form  in  which  we  have  it. 

But  the  great  myth-epic  of  Babylonia  was  that  of  Gilgamesh 
and  the  Flood.  It  is  "  the  most  beautiful,  most  impressive  and  most 
extensive  poem  which  has  been  preserved  to  us  of  the  literature 
of  the  ancient  Babylonians."  ^  The  text  we  have  was  written  on 
twelve  large  closely  written  tablets,  some  of  which  are  badly  broken ; 
and  was  copied  for  a  royal  Assyrian  library,  that  of  Ashur-bani-pal 
(668-626  B.C.),  from  some  old  Babylonian  sources,  such  as  have 
been  in  part  preserved  as  well  from  the  first  Babylonian  dynasty, 
of  about  2000  B.C.  Gilgamesh  was  the  ruler  of  one  of  the  city-states, 
Erech  or  Uruk,  who  wandered  to  that  mysterious  country  beyond 
the  western  sea,  where  he  learned  from  the  lips  of  Noah  himself,  — 
whose  Babylonian  name  was  Ut-napishtim,  —  the  story  of  the 
Flood.  The  epic  which  preserves  this  tale  is  a  strange  mixture  of 
sublime  Oriental  poetry,  rich  with  imagery,  swift  and  powerful 
in  narration,  with  sections  of  commonplace  details  as  to  the 
measurements  of  the  ark  and  of  the  business  routine  of  its 
management.  The  more  prosy  account  in  Genesis  is  here  em- 
bedded in  a  poem  that  rivals  the  Hellenic  or  Germanic  epics. 
Evidently  a  real  event  had  drifted  over  into  the  realm  of  legend 
and  romance. 

The  myths  of  Babylonia  reflect,  though  dimly,  real  conditions 
and  events,  but  they  lack  the  secular  tone  of  the  Homeric  epics. 
They  belong  with  religion  rather  than  forming  a  part  of  the  prelimi- 
nary processes  of  history.  Myths  of  origin  or  of  half-fabulous  heroes 
have  in  them  the  data  of  history ;  but  they  can  seldom  reveal  their 
historical  qualities  to  the  people  who  produce  them ;  for  that  re- 
quires an  attitude  of  unbelief  on  the  part  of  the  listener,  sufficient 
to  enable  him  to  apply  the  ruthless  surgery  of  criticism.  And  the 
age  that  applies  such  methods  to  discover  the  truth  must  know  how 
to  use  the  scalpel  or  it  simply  kills  the  whole  process,  so  that  myth 

^  Ibid.,  p.  80  (with  bibliography).  There  is  a  detailed  discussion  in  the  article 
Gilgamesh  by  M.  Jastrow  in  the  Encyclopedia  Britannica.  Gilgamesh  himself  re- 
sembles in  several  ways  the  Greek  Heracles^  Vide  L.  R.  Farnell,  Greece  and  Babylon 
(1911). 


70    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

and  fact  alike  disappear.  It  was  not  until  the  present  that  readers 
of  the  ancient  texts  could  so  discriminate  between  fact  and  super- 
stition in  the  early  tales  of  Babylonia ;  the  scholars  of  later  Baby- 
lonian ages  took  them  as  they  were. 

This  scholarship  did  produce  another  set  of  sources,  however, 
which  brings  one  to  the  very  threshold  of  historical  literature.  No 
civilization  ever  produced  more  codification  of  documents.  The 
code  of  Hammurabi  was  but  one  of  several,  and  recent  discoveries 
carry  the  procedure  back  to  Sumerian  beginnings.^  The  data  of 
religion  were  codified  as  well  as  those  of  law ;  vast  literatures  of 
omens  and  charms  grew  up  for  the  conduct  of  life  in  that  border- 
land of  luck  and  morals  which  was  the  field  of  Babylonian  magic 
and  religion.  Mathematics  and  a  study  of  the  stars  finally  brought 
the  content  to  the  verge  of  science,  through  astrology,  and  so  left 
a  doubly  deep  impress  upon  the  ancient  world.-  But  the  interest 
in  this  work  of  codifying  and  passing  along  the  ancient  lore  was  in 
the  application  for  the  future,  as  the  codifying  of  laws  was  for  the 
present.  The  interest  in  the  past  was  not  destined  to  produce  as 
notable  a  contribution,  mere  lists  of  names  and  dates  rising  at  last 
to  the  dignity  of  chronicles. 

The  earliest  records  are  lists  of  the  names  of  kings.  These  are 
of  great  importance  for  the  archaeologist,  and  two  such  lists,  known 
as  the  Babylonian  King  Lists  A  and  B,^  copied  out  in  the  late 
Babylonian  period,  show  how  these  could  persist  in  their  mud 
tablets  for  centuries,  to  be  available  for  the  scholars  of  the  last 
age  of  Babylon ;  since  similar  Sumerian  lists  have  also  been  dis- 
covered, enabling  comparison.  This  shows  that  as  early  as  the 
days  when  Hammurabi  was  inscribing  his  code,  scribes  were  also 
ensuring  an  accurate  statement  of  the  succession  of  rulers.      Date- 

^  Cf.  E.  Meyer,  Geschichie  des  AUertums  (s  vols.,  1884-1902;  3d  ed.,  Vol.  I,  1910- 
iQi3)>  (3d  ed.),  Vol.  I,  Sects.  313  sq.  The  code  of  Hammurabi  has  been  published 
several  times  in  English  translation.  Cf.  R.  W.  Rogers'  Parallels,  pp.  398  sqq.,  and 
R.  F.  Harper's  The  Code  of  Hammurabi  (1904). 

2  Vide  J.  T.  Shotwell,  The  Discovery  of  Time,  in  The  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Psy- 
chology and  Scientific  Methods,  Vol.  XII  (1915),  Nos.  8,  10,  12,  as  above;  Franz 
Cumont,  The  Oriental  Religions  in  Roman  Paganism  (tr.  191 1),  and  Astrology  and  Re- 
ligion among  the  Greeks  and  Romans  (191 2). 

3  Cf.  R.  W.  Rogers,  Cuneiform  Parallels  to  the  Old  Testament,  p.  201 ;  History  of 
Babylonia  and  Assyria,  Vol.  I,  p.  470. 


BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND  PERSIAN  RECORDS     71 

lists  were  also  kept,  in  order  to  place  the  years,  the  Babylonian 
way,  by  events  or  names.^ 

When  we  turn  from  these  meagre  lists  to  inscriptions  recording 
events,  we  find,  as  in  Egypt,  that  the  notable  ones  deal  with  current 
affairs,  for  the  most  part  glorifying  a  single  monarch.  A  common 
device  is  to  present  the  narrative  either  as  coming  from  the  king 
himself  or  from  a  god  —  a  sure  mark  of  authenticity  combined 
thriftily  with  devotion !  The  chronicle  grows  out  of  these  naturally, 
but  the  growth  in  Babylonia  was  slight  enough.  The  monastic 
hand  is  traceable  throughout.  Thin  dynastic  narratives  have  been 
found,  which  carry  a  continuous  story  from  reign  to  reign  —  or 
would  if  the  fragments  were  less  fragmentary .^  There  are  some 
that  go  back  to  recite  the  exploits  of  Sargon  I,  the  Semitic  Charle- 
magne of  this  monastic  literature,  whose  legendary  figure  loomed 
large  through  later  ages,  and  Naram-Sin  his  son.^  But  after  all, 
we  have  only  a  few  lines  at  best. 

The  closing  chapter  of  Babylonian  history  is,  strangely  enough, 
a  chapter  of  our  survey.  For  the  last  king,  Nabonidus,^  was  him- 
self, if  not  a  royal  historian,  at  least  an  archaeologist.  While  the 
Persians  under  Cyrus  were  gathering  in  the  nations  along  the  north 
and  making  ready  to  strike  at  the  old  centre  of  civilization  there, 
the  king  of  Babylonia  was  excavating  the  remains  of  its  distant 
past  as  he  sunk  the  foundations  for  his  own  new  temples  through  the 
debris  of  the  city  where  they  stood.  Although  his  son  Belshazzar, 
to  whom  the  administration  of  the  realm  fell,  could  see  the  hand- 
writing on  the  wall,  Nabonidus  was  not  interested  in  war,  but  was 
recording  with  a  scholar's  enthusiasm  such  facts  as  that  he  had 
unearthed  a  foundation  stone  of  Naram-Sin  "which  no  king  before 
me  had  seen  for  3200  years."  ^  To  these  archaeological  interests  of 
Nabonidus  the  modern  archaeologist  is  deeply  indebted ;  yet  the 
contribution  is  rather  in  the  field  of  chronology  than  of  history 
proper.    The  scribes  of  Nabonidus  searched  the  libraries  to  be 

1  Vide  supra,  Chap.  IV.  Cf.  E.  Meyer,  Geschichte  des  Altertums  (3d  ed.),  Vol.  I, 
Sect.  323. 

2  Vide  L.  W.  King,  Chronicles  Concerning  Early  Babylonian  Kings  (2  vols.,  1907). 
^  Cf.  L.  W.  King,  ibid.;  R.  W.  Rogers,  History,  Vol.  II,  p.  25 ;  Parallels,  p.  203. 
^  Cf.  R.  W.  Rogers,  History,  Vol.  I,  p.  493 ;  Parallels,  p.  373.     Nabonidus'  reign 

was  from  555  to  539  B.C. 

^Cf.  R.  W.  Rogers,  History,  Vol.  I,  p.  494,  with  references, 


72    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

able  to  place  the  kings  whose  inscriptions  he  found  in  their  proper 
places  in  the  lists,  and  to  calculate  the  stretch  of  years  before  their 
time.  But  gods  and  men  share  honors  alike,  in  this  careful  though 
undiscriminating  survey  of  what  were  already  ancient  times  in 
Babylonia. 

The  contribution  of  Assyria  to  historiography  is  so  closely  linked 
with  that  of  Babylonia  that  little  is  left  to  be  said  concerning  it. 
Like  the  meagre  lists  of  Babylonia,  we  find  here  lists  of  those  officers 
whose  names  gave  the  name  to  the  year,  arranged  in  an  Eponym 
Canon}  On  some  of  these,  as  on  the  calendar  tablets  of  the  mediaeval 
monasteries,  they  jotted  down  short  notes  of  events  in  the  year, 
especially  military  expeditions,  which  were  to  Assyria  what  temple- 
building  was  to  Babylonia.  More  significant  were  synchronistic 
chronicles,  giving  the  parallel  events  in  Babylonia  and  Assyria. 
All  of  these  are  of  great  importance  to  modern  scholars,  but  are 
slight  enough  in  themselves. 

The  chief  approach  to  history  in  Assyria  is  again  the  boastful 
record  of  single  reigns,  set  forth  for  the  glory  of  the  king.  Some 
of  these  are  detailed  and  graphic,  and  they  leave  us  living  pictures 
of  Sennacherib,  Tiglath-Pileser,  Shelmaneser  and  Esarhaddon,^  who 
are  now  as  real  to  us  as  the  figures  of  classical  history.  There  is  a 
persistent  minor  note  which  runs  through  these  proud  boastful 
assertions  of  the  royal  power,  which  should  not  escape  the  modern 
reader.  For,  however  sure  the  king  may  be  of  his  control  of  the 
world  of  his  own  day,  he  is  uneasy  about  the  future.  It  is  to  safe- 
guard that,  that  "memorial  stones"  are  inscribed  for  the  coming 
generations.  Yet  even  the  inscriptions  may  not  be  safe  at  the 
hands  of  one's  descendants.  The  thought  is  disquieting ;  and  the 
kings  either  plead  with  or  threaten  those  who  are  to  come  after. 
There  have  been  few  more  ruthless  criminals  in  the  world's  history 
than  Ashur-nasir-pal  III,^  the  Assyrian  Tamerlane,  and  few  annals 
from  the  monuments  equal  his  account  of  his  conquests  which  es- 
tablished the  Assyrian  power  in  western  Asia.  Yet  his  grasp  upon 
the  future  is  feeble  enough ;  he  pleads  as  follows : 

*  Vide  supra,  Chap.  IV. 

2  For  Esarhaddon  see  E.  A.  W.  Budge,  The  History  of  Esarhaddon  (1880). 
'  He  reigned  from  885  to  860  B.C.    Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the 
Near  East,  p.  445. 


BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND  PERSIAN  RECORDS     73 

".  .  .  O  thou  future  prince  among  the  kings,  my  sons  .  .  .  thou  shalt  not 
blot  out  my  name  which  is  inscribed  (hereon),  but  thy  own  name  thou  shalt 
inscribe  beside  my  name."  ^ 

But  the  records  of  the  Assyrian  kings  were  hardly  safe  if  left  to  the 
kindly  offices  of  their  successors.  Curses  were  more  effective,  as 
Shakespeare,  too,  thought ;  and  so  the  chronicle  would  close  with  a 
good  round  formula,  the  power  of  which  must  have  been  con- 
siderable in  the  land  of  omens  and  augural  science.  The  curse  of 
Ashur-nasir-pal  presents  so  realistic  a  picture  of  what  may  happen 
to  royal  records  that  it  may  be  quoted  at  length : 

"Whosoever  shall  not  act  according  to  the  word  of  this,  my  memorial  stone, 
and  shall  alter  the  words  of  my  inscription,  or  shall  destroy  this  image  or  con- 
ceal it,  or  shall  smear  it  with  grease  or  bury  it  in  the  earth,  or  burn  it  in  the 
fire,  or  cast  it  into  the  water,  or  place  it  so  that  beasts  may  tread  on  it  or  cattle 
pass  over  it,  or  prevent  men  from  beholding  and  reading  the  words  of  my  in- 
scription, or  shall  do  violence  to  my  memorial  stone  so  that  none  may  behold 
it ;  or,  because  of  these  curses  shall  send  a  foe  ...  or  a  prisoner  or  any  living 
creature  and  cause  him  to  take  it,  and  he  shall  deface  it  or  scrape  it  or  change 
it  into  a  foreign  tongue,  or  he  shall  turn  his  mind  ...  to  alter  the  words  — 
whether  he  be  scribe  or  soothsayer  or  any  other  man  —  ...  and  he  shall  say 
'I  know  him  not !  Surely  during  his  own  rule  men  slew  him  and  overthrew 
his  image  and  destroyed  it  and  altered  the  words  of  his  mouth,'  .  .  .  may 
Ashur,  the  great  lord,  the  god  of  Assyria,  the  lord  of  destinies,  curse  his  destiny, 
and  may  he  alter  his  deeds  and  utter  an  evil  curse  that  the  foundation  of  his 
kingdom  may  be  rooted  up.  ..."  * 

With  such  an  appeal  to  the  guardianship  of  the  gods  and  the 
fears  of  men  one  might  leave  the  record  to  the  keeping  of  history. 
It  was  all  one  could  do.  Yet  it  was  not  enough.  The  history  of 
the  Assyrians  was  soon  lost.  Already  by  the  time  of  Xenophon, 
no  one  could  tell  the  true  meaning  of  the  nameless  mounds  in  which 
lay  embedded  all  that  was  left  of  the  splendor  of  Nineveh.^  The 
Greeks  knew  something  of  Babylon,  but  almost  nothing  of  Assyria.^ 

*  Cf.  E.  A.  W.  Budge  and  L.  W.  King,  Tlie  Annals  of  tlie  Kings  of  Assyria  (1902), 
Vol.  I,  p.  165.  See  the  similar  plea  of  Tiglath-Pileser  I,  ibid.,  p.  104.  Such  formulae 
are  common  in  the  inscriptions. 

^  Ibid.^  Vol.  I,  pp.  249  sqq. 

^  Anabasis,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  IV,  Sects,  i-io.    He  marched  past  in  401  B.C. 

*  It  is  striking  that  the  case  is  somewhat  reversed  now ;  we  know  the  history  of 
Assyria  better  than  that  of  more  ancient  Babylonia.  As  E.  Meyer  remarks,  Geschichte 
des  AUertums  (3d  ed.),  Vol.  I,  Sects.  315-316,  the  sudden  destruction  of  Nineveh 


74    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

It  remains  only  to  note  the  attempt  made  under  the  last  of  the 
great  Assyrian  kings,  Ashur-bani-pal  (668-626  B.C.),  to  improve 
upon  his  predecessors  and  to  give  to  his  inscriptions  something  of 
the  character  of  history.  The  king  himself  was  not  only  a  famous 
conqueror  but  a  patron  of  learning,  and  found  time  from  his  wars 
to  bring  together  a  vast  library;  some  20,000  tablets  remain  to 
show  the  activity  of  his  scribes,  who  copied  the  great  cuneiform 
heritage.^  His  own  inscriptions  forsake  the  terse  phrases  of  the 
older  style  for  an  essay  in  history  in  the  grand  style,  the  finest  product 
Assyria  could  yield.  But  the  substance  remains  much  the  same; 
and  the  attempt  to  rearrange  events  in  some  topic  order  instead  of 
following  the  strict  chronological  sequence,  leads  to  confusion  and 
loses  more  than  it  gains 

The  Persians  continued  the  regal  tradition  of  Baby  Ionia- Assyria, 
and  one  of  the  greatest  records  in  the  world  is  that  which,  on  the 
almost  inaccessible  precipice  of  Behistun,  recites  the  deeds  and 
exalts  the  glory  of  Darius  the  Great  to  the  untenanted  desert ! 
But  though  the  desert  roads  are  unfrequented  now,  this  Gibraltar- 
like rock  stands  facing  the  one  great  highway  between  central  Asia 
and  Mesopotamia,  and  there,  where  the  traffic  between  East  and 
West  would  pass,  on  the  bare  face  of  the  cliff,  three  hundred  feet 
above  the  roadway,  were  sculptured  the  figures  of  Darius  and  the 
"rebels"  he  overthrew,  and  the  long  inscription  describing  the 
events  of  his  reign. ^ 

The  inscription  was  destined  to  do  more  than  Darius  could  have 
imagined,  for  by  means  of  it  the  key  was  found  which  unlocked 

was  fortunate,  for  the  remains  were  at  once  buried  and  so  preserved,  while  Babylon 
was  repeatedly  despoiled. 

^Cf.  E.  Meyer,  GeschicJite  des  AUerhirns,  loc.  cit.;  R.  W.  Rogers,  History,  Vol.  II, 
pp.  427  sqq.  H.  R.  Hall,  Ancient  History,  p.  500.  To  it  we  owe  the  preservation  of 
such  sources  for  Babylonian  history  as  the  Sargon  chronicle,  etc. 

2  Professor  A.  V.  W.  Jackson,  who  visited  Behistun  in  1903,  thus  describes  it  in 
Persia,  Past  and  Present  (1906),  p.  187:  "With  all  I  had  read  about  Behistun,  with 
all  I  had  heard  about  it,  and  with  all  I  had  thought  about  it  beforehand,  I  had  not  the 
faintest  conception  of  the  Gibraltar-like  impressiveness  of  this  rugged  crag  until  I 
came  into  its  Titan  presence  and  felt  the  grandeur  of  its  sombre  shadow  and  towering 
frame.  Snow  and  clouds  capped  its  peaks  at  the  time,  and  birds  innumerable  were 
soaring  around  it  aloft  or  hovering  near  the  place  where  the  inscriptions  were  hewn 
into  the  rock.  There,  as  I  looked  upward,  I  could  see,  more  than  three  hundred  feet 
above  the  ground,  the  bas-relief  of  the  great  King  Darius." 


BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND  PERSIAN  RECORDS     75 

cuneiform  to  modern  scholars.  The  text  had  been  recorded  in  Per- 
sian, Susian  and  Babylonian,  and  when,  in  1833-183  7  (and  again 
in  1844),  Sir  Henry  Rawlinson,  then  a  young  officer  in  the  Indian 
service,  at  the  risk  of  his  life  clambered  up  the  rock  and  copied  the 
inscription,  he  was  able  (later)  to  translate  it  as  well.  In  such 
dramatic  fashion,  the  Behistun  inscription  became  the  Rosetta 
stone  of  the  cuneiform  texts.^ 

The  inscription  of  Darius  is  divided  into  some  fifty  or  sixty 
sections,  each  devoted  to  a  different  subject  and  each  beginning 
"Thus  saith  Darius  the  king."  The  first  ten  give  the  genealogy 
of  Darius  and  a  description  of  the  provinces  of  his  empire.  With 
the  tenth  section  the  history  begins,  and  it  may  be  quoted  to  give 
an  idea  of  how  the  succeeding  ones  run : 

"(Thus)  saith  Darius,  the  king:  This  is  what  was  done  by  me  after  I  be- 
came king.  He  who  was  named  Cambyses,  the  son  of  Cyrus,  one  of  our  race, 
was  king  here  before  me.  That  Cambyses  had  a  brother,  Smerdis  by  name, 
of  the  same  mother  and  the  same  father  as  Cambyses.  Afterwards  Cambyses 
slew  this  Smerdis.  When  Cambyses  slew  Smerdis,  it  was  not  known  unto 
people  that  Smerdis  was  slain.  Thereupon  Cambyses  went  into  Egypt.  When 
Cambyses  had  departed  into  Egypt,  the  people  became  hostile,  and  the  lie  mul- 
tiplied in  the  land,  even  in  Persia,  as  in  Media,  and  in  the  other  provinces."  ^ 

The  inscription  closes  with  an  appeal  to  posterity,  similar  to 
those  of  the  other  regal  chronicles  described  above : 

"  If  thou  seest  this  inscription  beside  these  sculptures  and  destroyest 
them  not,  but  guardest  them  as  thou  livest,  then  shall  Auramazda  be  thy 
friend  and  thy  race  shalt  thou  perpetuate,  and  thou  shalt  live  a  long  life  and 
whatsoever  thou  desirest  to  do  shall  Auramazda  cause  to  prosper."  ^ 

But  if  not,  then  the  curse  of  Auramazda  is  invoked  on  the  evil-doer. 
Fortunately  the  curse  has  not  been  tested  by  the  vandal ;  the  texts 
are  too  inaccessible. 

Like  Egypt,  though,  the  Empires  of  Asia  were  touched  into  new 
life  when  the  Greeks  invaded  them,  either  as  travellers  or  as  bene- 

'  See  the  fine  volume,  with  notable  illustrations.  The  Sculptures  and  Inscription 
of  Darius  the  Great  on  the  Rock  of  Behistun,  published  anonymously  by  the  British 
Museum  (1907).  The  authors  are  L.  W.  King  and  R.  C.  Thompson,  who  prepared  a 
new  copy  by  careful  work  on  the  spot.     Cf.  R.  W.  Rogers,  History,  Vol.  I,  p.  80. 

'^  L.  W.  King  and  R.  C.  Thompson,  op.  cit.,  Persian  text,  pp.  6-7. 

'  Ihid.,  Susian  text,  p.  149. 


76    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

ficiaries  of  the  Macedonian  conquest.  The  earliest  of  these  wander- 
ers whose  record  of  his  impressions  we  possess  was  no  less  a  personage 
than  Herodotus,  the  "Father  of  History  "  himself.^  But  the  story  of 
Assyria-Babylonia  accepted  in  the  ancient  world  was  largely  drawn 
from  that  of  Ctesias  of  Cnidus,  who  lived  from  415  to  398  B.C.  as 
personal  physician  to  the  king  of  Persia,  Artaxerxes  Mnemon.  His 
Persica  was  a  magnum  opus  of  twenty-three  books,  the  first  three  of 
which  dealt  with  the  ancient  kingdoms,  the  fourth  with  their  over- 
throw by  the  Medes,  and  the  remaining  nineteen  with  Persian  his- 
tory .^  This  uncritical  mixture  of  invention  and  credulity,  utterly 
unreliable,  has  not  even  the  merits  of  a  romance,  since  it  imposed 
itself  as  history  upon  the  sober  chronographers  of  Alexandria.^ 

Berossos,  a  Babylonian  priest  of  Bel,  who  wrote  his  three 
books,  Bahylonica  or  Caldaica,  about  280  B.C.,  was  better  equipped 
to  open  up  to  the  Hellenic  world  the  mysteries  of  his  home-land.^ 
He  could  know  the  sources  in  the  original.  This  text  is  lost, 
but  such  extracts  as  have  been  preserved  enable  us  to  form  a 
very  fair  idea  of  it.^  There  were  these  different  parts:  first  a 
mythical,  legendary  section  dealing  with  the  period  from  Creation 
to  the  Flood ;  then  a  thin  list  of  names  of  kings  from  the  Flood 
to  Nabonassar  with  no  account  of  their  deeds;  and  a  closing 
section  of  detailed  narrative  of  the  more  recent  history.  The 
whole  work  was  prefaced  with  a  description  of  the  country  ap- 
parently in  the  manner  of  Herodotus.^    The  myth  with  which  his 

1  As  Herodotus  reproduced  Hecatasus  in  part,  we  have  some  trace  of  his  investi- 
gations as  well. 

2  Cf.  C.  Wachsmuth,  Einleitimg  in  das  Studium  der  alten  Geschichte  (1895),  pp.  367 
sqq.;  R.  W.  Rogers,  History,  Vol.  I,  p.  391.  It  was  still  complete  in  the  ninth  century 
A.D.  Diodorus  Siculus,  Bibliothcca  Historica  (Bk.  II,  Chaps.  I-XXXIV),  repeats  the 
stories  about  the  Assyrian  part. 

2  A.  H.  Sayce,  The  Ancient  Empires  of  the  East  (1900),  p.  xxiii,  took  occasion  to 
say  a  good  word  for  him,  however,  while  criticising  Herodotus. 

^  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East,  p.  14;  R.  W.  Rogers,  His- 
tory, Vol.  I,  p.  388,  Parallels,  pp.  76  sqq.  (for  translation  of  a  section). 

^  The  extracts,  as  in  the  case  of  Manetho,  were  preserved  by  Josephus,  Against 
Apion,  Bk.  I,  Sects.  19  sqq.,  and  Eusebius  at  the  opening  of  his  Chronicorum  Liber 
Primus,  quoting  Alexander  Polyhistor,  an  antiquarian  of  the  time  of  Sulla.  Texts 
and  translation  by  I.  P.  Cory  in  Ancient  Fragments  of  Phcenician,  Chaldcean, 
Egyptian,  .  .  .  and  Other  Writers. 

6  Eusebius  {op.  cit.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  II)  summarizes  this  as  follows:  "And  first,  he 
says,  that  the  land  of  the  Babylonians  lies  on  the  river  Tigris  and  that  the  Euphrates 


BABYLONIAN,  ASSYRIAN  AND  PERSIAN  RECORDS     77 

narrative  begins,  that  of  the  gift  of  the  arts  of  civilization  to  man 
by  a  sea-monster  Oannes,  is  taken  by  modern  historians  to  contain 
a  possible  dim  reflection  of  a  tradition  that  the  Sumerians,  that 
earliest  of  all  the  people  of  Babylonia,  came  from  India  by  way  of 
the  Persian  Gulf.^  On  the  chance  that  it  may  be  so,  and  that  it  is, 
therefore,  the  farthest  echo  of  historical  fact  that  has  reached 
our  ears  from  beyond  the  frontiers  of  knowledge,  we  may  quote  the 
grotesque  narrative  as  Eusebius  has  preserved  it : 

"In  the  first  years,  so  he  (Berossos)  says,  there  appeared  from  the  Red 
Sea,  even  there  in  the  midst  of  the  territory  of  the  Babylonians,  a  terrible  mon- 
ster, whose  name  was  Oannes.  .  .  .  And  of  this  animal  he  says  that  it  was  in 
daily  intercourse  with  men,  never  touching  food ;  and  it  taught  men  writing 
and  the  manifold  arts,  the  building  of  cities  and  the  founding  of  temples;  also 
the  giving  of  law  and  the  terms  of  boundaries  and  divisions.  Also  it  is  said  to 
have  taught  men  the  harvest  of  wheat  and  fruit ;  and  indeed  everything  which 
is  of  use  to  the  life  of  organized  society  was  delivered  by  him  to  man.  And 
since  that  time  nothing  more  has  been  invented  by  anyone.^ 

"  And  at  sunset  the  monster  Oannes  plunged  again  into  the  sea,  and  passed 
the  night  on  the  high  sea.  So  that  it  led  a  double  life  to  a  certain  extent.  And 
later  other  similar  monsters  appeared  which  he  says  he  treats  of  in  the  book  of 
the  kings.  And  Oannes,  he  says,  has  written  the  following  account  of  the  crea- 
tion and  the  commonwealth  and  bestowed  speech  and  aptness  to  the  arts  upon 
man."  ^ 

That  Berossos  could  turn  from  such  luxuriant  Oriental  myths  as 
this  to  a  mere  list  of  names  in  his  historical  section  argues  well  for 
his  sense  of  scholarship  if  not  for  his  critical  ability.  For  obviously 
he  was  following  his  sources  closely,  a  fact  which  recent  investi- 
gations tend  to  corroborate.  But  his  antique  editor  took  another 
point  of  view.  The  inference  he  drew  was  that  one  who  knew  so 
little  in  one  section  must  be  an  unreliable  witness  in  another !    The 

flows  through  the  midst  of  it,  and  the  land  brings  forth  of  itself,  wheat,  barley,  lentils, 
millet,  and  sesame.  And  in  the  swamps  and  reeds  of  the  river  were  certain  edible 
roots  called  gong,  which  have  the  strength  of  barley-bread.  Dates  and  apples  and 
all  kinds  of  other  fruits  grow  there  too,  and  there  are  fishes  and  fowls  and  birds  of 
fields  and  swamps.  The  land  has  also  arid  and  barren  territories  (the  Arabian) ;  and 
opposite  the  land  of  Arabia,  it  is  mountainous  and  fruitful.  But  in  Babylon  an  enor- 
mous mass  of  strange  people  was  settled,  in  the  land  of  the  Chalda^ans,  and  they  lived 
in  licentiousness,  like  the  unreasoning  animals  and  the  wild  cattle." 

1  Cf.  H.  R.  Hall,  The  Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East,  p.  174,  note. 

2  Note  this  magnificent  statement  of  the  static,  conservative  idea. 
^  Eusebius,  Chronicorum  Liber  Primus,  Chap.  II. 


78    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

comment  of  Eusebius  shows  what  temptations  to  give  a  little  more 
than  full  measure  lay  in  the  path  of  the  antique  historian !  ^ 

It  would  be  only  fair  to  Berossos  to  quote,  in  contrast  to  these 
legendary  and  chronological  sections,  something  from  the  later 
part,  where  he  is  on  firmer  historical  ground.  Josephus  gives  us 
a  long  enough  excerpt  of  this  to  show  that  here  it  rose  to  something 
of  the  dignity  of  genuine  history .^  There  is  a  description  of  Babylon 
in  its  last  splendor,  with  the  "hanging  gardens"  and  the  other  feats 
of  engineering,  and  a  criticism  of  the  mistakes  of  Greek  historians 
who  held  to  the  myth  of  the  founding  of  Babylon  by  Semiramis. 
But  this  is  about  all  we  have ;  and  in  view  of  the  relatively  small 
fragment  of  the  whole  history  which  has  been  preserved,  we  are 
hardly  justified  in  delaying  further  over  it.  And  with  Berossos  we 
quit  Babylonia. 

1  Cf.  Eusebius,  ihid.:  "If  they  (the  Chaldaeans)  had  only  told  of  deeds  and  works 
accomplished  by  the  long  succession  of  rulers  in  these  thousands  of  years,  corresponding 
to  the  vast  extent  of  time,  one  might  properly  hesitate  whether  there  were  not  some 
truth  in  the  matter  after  all.  But  since  they  have  merely  assigned  to  the  rule  of 
those  ten  men  so  many  myriads  of  years,  who  is  there  who  should  not  regard  such 
indiscriminate  accounts  as  myths." 

*  Josephus,  Against  Apion,  Bk.  I,  Sects.  19-20. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  most  Useful  guides  to  the  non-technical  student  of  Baby  Ionian- Assyrian 
history  are  those  of  R.  W.  Rogers  referred  to  above,  his  Cuneiform  Parallels 
to  the  Old  Testament  (191 2),  and  his  History  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria  (2  vols., 
1915),  in  which  a  full  account  is  given  of  the  progress  of  modern  scholarship  and 
a  helpful  and  adequate  bibliographical  apparatus.  The  works  of  Morris 
Jastrow,  especially  The  Civilization  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria  (1915)  should  also 
be  consulted,  as  well  as  those  of  L.  W.  King.  The  articles  by  these  two  scholars 
in  the  Encyclopcedia  Britannica  are  good  short  surveys.  Good  discussions  occur 
in  H.  R.  Hall's  Ancient  History  of  the  Near  East  (19 13),  to  which  constant  refer- 
ence has  been  made  in  the  text.  References  to  the  great  collections  of  the 
original  texts  will  be  found  in  these  works,  but  mention  should  be  made  of  the 
remarkable  series  edited  by  H.  V.  Hilprecht,  The  Babylonian  Expedition  of  the 
University  of  Pennsylvania  (1893-1911),  continued  as  Publications  of  the 
Babylonian  Section,  University  of  Pennsylvania  Museum. 


SECTION    II 
JEWISH   HISTORY 

CHAPTER  VII 

THE  OLD   TESTAMENT  AS  HISTORY 

When  we  turn  from  these  poor  and  thin  records  of  the  great 
empires  of  the  East  to  the  history  of  that  little  branch  of  the  Semites 
which  clung  to  the  perilous  post  on  the  land-bridge  between  the 
Euphrates  and  the  Nile,  the  Hebrews  of  Palestine,  we  are  struck 
at  once  with  the  comparative  wealth  of  its  national  annals.  In 
contrast  with  the  product  of  Egypt  or  Babylonia,  the  Bible  stands 
out  as  an  epoch-making  achievement.  A  composite  work  of  many 
centuries,  filled  with  much  that  the  historian  rejects,  it  yet  em- 
bodies the  first  historical  work  of  genuinely  national  importance 
which  has  come  down  to  us.^  Higher  criticism  has  robbed  it  of  its 
unique  distinction  as  a  special  revelation  of  Jehovah,  denied  the 
historicity  of  its  account  of  the  Creation  and  destroyed  the  claim 
of  the  legends  of  the  patriarchs  to  be  regarded  as  authentic;  the 
great  name  of  Moses  disappears  as  the  author  of  the  Pentateuch, 
and  that  of  David  from  the  book  of  Psalms ;  the  story  of  Joseph 
becomes  a  romance,  the  Decalogue  a  statement  of  late  prophetic 
ideals ;  the  old  familiar  books  dissolve  into  their  component  parts, 

*  The  treatment  of  the  historical  records  of  the  Jews  is  here  taken  up  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  completed  output,  the  Bible  as  we  now  have  it.  This  is  mainly 
for  the  sake  of  clarity.  A  more  historical  treatment  would  be  to  begin  with  the  ele- 
ments as  thev  existed  in  the  earliest  days  and  bring  the  story  down,  as  it  really  hap- 
pened, instead  of  going  backwards,  analyzing  the  completed  text.  This  historical 
treatment  has  been  admirably  followed  out  by  H.  Schmidt  in  his  booklet  in  the  Re- 
ligionsgeschichtUche  Volksbucher  series  (Series  II,  No.  16),  entitled  Die  Geschichts- 
schreibung  int  alien  Testament  (igii).  The  volume  by  Julius  Bewer  in  this  series 
(of  the  Records  of  Civilization,  to  be  published  shortly),  The  Literature  of  the  Old 
Testament  in  its  Historical  Development,  should  be  at  hand  to  develop,  and  perhaps 
to  correct,  the  points  touched  upon  in  these  pages. 

79 


8o    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

written  at  diflferent  times  and  by  dififerent  hands.  In  short,  a 
national  record,  of  varying  value  and  varying  historical  reliability, 
has  replaced  the  Bible  of  the  churches,  of  stately  uniform  text  and 
unvarying  authority.  Nevertheless,  it  is  possible  to  claim  that, 
judged  as  historical  material,  the  Old  Testament  stands  higher  to- 
day than  when  its  text  was  protected  with  the  sanctions  of  religion. 
For  it  was  not  until  its  exceptional  and  sacred  character  was  denied 
that  it  could  be  appraised  by  the  standards  of  history  and  its  value 
as  a  repository  of  national,  if  not  of  world,  story  be  fairly  ap- 
preciated. So  long  as  the  distinction  existed  which  exalted  the 
Jewish  scriptures  as  sacred  inspiration  above  the  rest  of  the  world's 
literature,  the  historicity  of  the  Old  Testament  had  to  be  accepted 
on  a  different  basis  from  that  of  other  narratives.  Sacred  and  pro- 
fane history  are  by  nature  incomparable ;  for  the  author  of  the  one 
is  God,  of  the  other,  man.  Now,  no  higher  tribute  could  be  paid 
to  the  historical  worth  of  the  Old  Testament  than  the  statement 
that,  when  considered  upon  the  profane  basis  of  human  authorship, 
it  still  remains  one  of  the  greatest  products  in  the  history  of  History, 
a  record  of  national  tradition,  outlook  and  aspiration,  produced  by 
a  poor,  harassed,  semi-barbarous  people  torn  by  feud  and  swept 
by  conquest,  which  yet  retains  the  undying  charm  of  genuine  art 
and  the  universal  appeal  of  human  interest.  That  is  not  to  say 
that,  viewed  from  the  standpoint  of  modern  history,  it  is  a  remark- 
able performance ;  for  while  it  embodies  some  passages  of  great 
power  and  lasting  beauty,  the  narrative  is  often  awkward,  self- 
contradictory,  clogged  with  genealogies  and  overloaded  with 
minute  and  tiresome  ceremonial  instructions.  The  historian,  how- 
ever, should  not  judge  it  from  the  modern  standpoint.  He  should 
not  compare  Genesis  with  Ranke,  but  with  the  product  of  Egypt 
and  Assyria.  Judged  in  the  light  of  its  own  time  the  literature 
of  the  Jews  is  unique  in  scope  as  in  power.  It  is  the  social  ex- 
pression of  a  people  moving  up  from  barbarism  to  civilization ;  and 
if  its  pastoral  tales  reveal  here  and  there  the  savage  Bedouin  and 
its  courtly  chronicle  is  touched  with  the  exaggerations  of  hero- 
myths,  if  its  priestly  reforms  and  prophetic  morals  are  allowed  to 
obscure  the  currents  of  more  worldly  politics,  all  of  these  elements 
but  mirror  a  changing  outlook  of  different  ages  in  the  evolution  of 
one  of  the  most  highly  gifted  peoples  of  the  ancient  world. 


THE  OLD  TESTAMENT  AS  HISTORY  Si 

The  trouble  has  been  that  this  mass  of  literary  remains  has  been 
taken  for  something  other  than  what  it  was.  The  rabbis  came  to 
view  its  last  editorial  revision  as  the  authoritative  and  divine  state- 
ment of  the  whole  world's  story,  and  the  theologians  of  succeeding 
centuries  accepted  their  outlook  with  unquestioning  faith.  In 
short,  the  Bible  became  more  and  more  unhistorical  as  it  became 
more  and  more  sacred.  Higher  criticism,  viewing  the  texts  his- 
torically, at  last  reveals  their  setting  in  their  own  time  and  place, 
and  presents  them  as  a  national  product  instead  of  a  record  of 
creation  in  the  words  of  the  Creator.  For  the  former  it  is  adequate, 
for  the  latter  no  doctrinal  apologies  could  save  it  from  the  shafts 
of  ridicule. 

The  most  important  service,  however,  which  higher  criticism 
has  rendered  the  Old  Testament,  is  that  it  has  allowed  us  to  dis- 
tinguish between  the  validity  of  different  parts,  to  detect  the  naive 
folk-tale  in  which  Jahveh  and  the  patriarchs  meet  at  old  hill- 
sanctuaries  and  the  late  priestly  narrative  reconstructing  the  whole 
in  terms  of  the  temple  at  Jerusalem.  The  finer  passages  are  no 
longer  involved  in  the  fate  of  the  rest.  It  is  therefore  possible  to 
appreciate  the  genuine  achievements  of  the  chief  historians  of 
Israel  for  the  first  time. 

The  Bible,  as  the  name  implies,  is  a  collection  of  books.^  It  is 
not  a  single,  consistent  whole,  but  a  miscellany.  The  first  step  in 
understanding  it  is  to  realize  that  it  comprises  the  literary  heritage 
of  a  nation,  —  all  that  has  survived,  or  nearly  so,  of  an  antiquity 
of  many  centuries.  It  includes  legends  from  the  camps  of  nomads, 
borrowings  from  Babylon,  Egypt  and  Persia,  annals  of  royal  courts, 
laws,  poems  and  prophecies.  It  preserves  these,  not  in  their 
original  form,  but  in  fragments  recast  or  reset  to  suit  the  purpose 
of  a  later  day.  For,  down  to  the  very  close  of  Jewish  history  the 
process  of  editing  and  re-editing  this  huge,  conglomerate  mass  went 
on.  Moreover,  as  the  editors  were  theologians  rather  than  his- 
torians, the  result  was  as  bad  for  history  as  it  has  been  accounted 
good  for  theology,  and  the  historian  today  has  to  undo  most  of 

*  /3i/3Xos  was  the  inner  bark  of  the  papyrus,  hence  applied  to  the  paper  made  from 
it.  From  this  it  was  applied  to  the  book  made  of  the  paper.  /3i/3Xia  (bible)  is  the 
plural  of  /3t/3Mo;/,  a  diminutive  of  j3i/3Xos.     Vide  supra,  Chap.  III. 


82    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

their  work  to  reach  the  various  layers  of  sources  upon  which  they 
built  the  Bible  as  we  know  it,  —  sources  which  represent  the  real 
heritage  of  the  ancient  days.  One  must  dig  for  these  beneath  the 
present  text,  just  as  one  digs  the  soil  of  ancient  cities  for  the  streets 
and  walls  of  former  times.  For  the  literary  and  the  material  monu- 
ments of  a  people  share  a  somewhat  similar  fate.  The  Bible  of  to- 
day stands  like  some  modern  Athens  or  Rome  upon  the  fragments 
of  its  former  elements.  The  legends  and  laws  of  the  early  time 
are  buried  deep  beneath  the  structures  of  later  ages.  More  than 
once  they  have  been  burned  over  by  conquest  and  civil  feud,  and, 
when  restored,  built  up  to  suit  new  plans  and  different  purposes. 
Today,  however,  the  historian  can  lay  bare  the  various  strata,  re- 
cover the  ancient  landmarks,  and  from  their  remains  reconstruct 
in  imagination  each  successive  stage  of  the  story.  So,  like  the 
archaeologist,  who  sees  not  merely  the  city  of  the  present  or  of  its 
classic  splendor,  but  the  cities  of  every  era  in  the  long,  eventful 
past,  the  student  of  higher  criticism  can  now  trace  the  process 
of  the  formation  of  the  Bible  from  the  crude,  primitive  beginnings 
—  the  tenements  of  barbarian  thought  —  to  the  period  when  its 
contents  were  laid  out  in  the  blocks  of  books  as  we  have  them  now, 
faced  with  the  marble  of  unchangeable  text,  and  around  them  all 
were  flung  the  sacred  walls  of  canonicity.  The  walls  are  now 
breached ;  and  the  exploring  scientist  can  wander  at  will  through 
the  historic  texts,  unhampered  by  any  superstitious  fears.  We 
shall  follow  him  —  hurriedly. 

There  was  once  a  historian  of  our  southern  states  who  prepared 
himself  for  his  life's  work  in  the  highly  controversial  period  of  the 
Civil  War  by  taking  a  doctorate  in  mediaeval  history.  In  an  alien 
field,  where  his  personal  feelings  could  not  warp  his  judgment,  he 
learned  the  scientific  temper.  Something  of  his  discipline  is  incum- 
bent upon  every  student  of  the  Bible.  Let  us  imagine,  for  instance, 
that  instead  of  the  Jewish  scriptures  we  are  talking  of  those  of  the 
Greeks.  Suppose  that  the  heritage  of  Hellas  had  been  preserved 
to  us  in  the  form  of  a  Bible.  What  would  be  the  character  of  the 
book?  We  should  begin,  perhaps,  with  a  few  passages  from  Hesiod 
on  the  birth  of  the  gods  and  the  dawn  of  civilization  mingled  with 
fragments  of  the  Iliad  and  both  set  into  long  excerpts  from  He- 
rodotus.   The  dialogues  of  Plato  might  be  given  by  Homeric  heroes 


THE  OLD   TESTAMENT  AS  HISTORY  83 

and  the  text  of  the  great  dramatists  (instead  of  the  prophets)  be 
preserved  interspersed  one  with  another  and  clogged  with  the  un- 
inspired and  uninspiring  comments  of  Alexandrian  savants.  Then 
imagine  that  the  sense  of  their  authority  was  so  much  obscured  as 
centuries  passed,  that  philosophers  —  for  philosophers  were  to 
Greece  what  theologians  were  to  Israel  —  came  to  believe  that  the 
large  part  of  this  composite  work  of  history  and  philosophy  had 
been  first  written  down  by  Solon  as  the  deliverance  of  the  oracle 
of  Apollo  at  Delphi.  Then,  finally,  imagine  that  the  text  became 
stereotyped  and  sacred,  even  the  words  taboo,  and  became  the 
heritage  of  alien  peoples  who  knew  nothing  more  of  Greek  history 
than  what  this  compilation  contained.  Such,  with  some  little  ex- 
aggeration, would  be  a  Hellenic  Bible  after  the  fashion  of  the  Bible 
of  the  Jews.  If  the  comparison  be  a  little  overdrawn  there  is  no 
danger  but  that  we  shall  make  sufficient  mental  reservations  to 
prevent  us  from  carrying  it  too  far.  Upon  the  whole,  so  far  as 
form  and  structure  go,  the  analogy  holds  remarkably  well. 

The  Jews  divided  their  scriptures  into  three  main  parts :  The 
Law  or  Torah,  the  Prophets,  and  a  miscellany  loosely  termed  "The 
Writings."  The  Law  is  better  known  to  Christians  by  the  name 
given  it  by  the  Jews  of  Alexandria  when  they  translated  it  into 
Greek,  the  Pentateuch  ^  —  or  five  books  —  or  by  the  more  definite 
title  of  "The  Five  Books  of  Moses,"  an  attribution  which  rests  on 
a  late  Jewish  tradition.^  It  is  with  these  books  that  we  have  mainly 
to  deal,  for  they  furnish  most  of  the  fundamental  historical  problems 
of  the  Old  Testament;  but  the  finest  narrative  lies  rather  in  the 
second  group,  which  included  as  well  as  the  books  of  prophecies, 
the  four  histories,  Joshua,  Judges,  Samuel  and  Kings .^    The  third 

1  They  are  also  responsible  for  the  names  of  the  separate  books,  Genesis,  Exodus, 
Deuteronomy,  Leviticus.  Numbers  (Nmneri)  comes  from  the  Latin.  It  is  customary 
now  to  group  with  these  five  books  Joshua,  which  is  closely  connected  both  in  form 
and  matter.    This  makes  a  Hexateuch  instead  of  a  Pentateuch. 

2  This  attribution  of  the  Pentateuch  to  Moses  is  probably  found  in  II  Chronicles 
23^^  25\  35^-;  Ezra  3^,  6^^;  Nehemiah  13' ;  Daniel  q^'^^  h  is  found  in  Philo  (fl.  at 
the  time  of  Christ),  and  in  Josephus  (first  century  a.d.)  It  also  occurs  in  the 
New  Testament. 

3  The  "  Prophets"  included  the  three  major  prophets,  Israel,  Jeremiah,  and  Ezekiel, 
and  "the  Twelve"  {i.e.  minor  prophets),  whose  prophecies  formed  one  book. 


84    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

division,  the  ''Writings"  or  "Scriptures,"  of  which  the  Psalms,  Job 
and  Proverbs  are  typical,  contained  as  well  some  of  the  later  his- 
tories —  the  Chronicles,  Ezra  and  Nehemiah.^ 
To  the  first  of  these  groups  we  now  turn. 

^The  full  list  of  "the  Scriptures"  is:  Ruth,  Psalms,  Job,  Proverbs,  Ecclesiastes, 
Song  of  Songs,  Lamentations,  Daniel,  Esther,  Ezra,  Nehemiah,  Chronicles, 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  higher  criticism  of  the  Old  Testament  and  its  analysis  into  its  con- 
stituent parts  goes  back  to  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  to  the 
work  of  Dr.  J.  Astruc,  Conjectures  sur  les  mSmoires  originaux  dont  il  pardit  que 
Moyse  se  servit  pour  composer  le  livre  de  la  Genese,  published  in  1753.  Slowly 
but  steadily  during  the  century  following,  scholarship  gained  upon  prejudice, 
but  it  was  not  until  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  that  the  doors  were 
really  thrown  wide  open  to  criticism  by  the  great  work  of  J.  WeUhausen.  His 
Prolegomena  to  t/ie  History  of  Israel  (English  translation,  1885)  and  his  article 
Israel  and  those  by  W.  Robertson  Smith  in  the  ninth  edition  of  the  Ency- 
clopcBdia  Britannica  marked  the  end  of  an  era.  The  modern  literature  is  so 
vast  that  only  a  few  references  can  be  given  here.  Most  of  the  important 
foreign  works  have  been  translated,  and  the  articles  in  the  leading  encyclo- 
paedias may  be  turned  to  for  introductory  outlines  and  bibliographies  of  specific 
sections.  Popular  introductions  to  the  subject  are  to  be  found  in  G.  F.  Moore, 
The  Literature  of  the  Old  Testament  (Home  University  Library,  1913);  G.  B. 
Gray,  A  Critical  Introduction  to  the  Old  Testament  (1913);  H.  T.  Fowler,  A 
History  of  tlie  Literature  of  Ancient  Israel  from  the  Earliest  Times  to  13 j  B.C. 
(191 2).  Other  works  are  S.R.  Driver,  An  Introduction  to  the  Literature  of  the  Old 
Testament  (9th  ed.,  1913) ;  C.  H.  Cornill,  Introduction  to  tJie  Canonical  Books 
of  the  Old  Testament  (tr.  1907) ;  E.  Kautzsch,  An  Outline  of  the  History  of  the 
Literature  of  the  Old  Testament  (tr.  1899).  For  an  edition  of  the  books  of  the 
Old  Testament  based  on  the  results  of  modern  scholarship,  see  C.  F.  Kent, 
Student's  Old  Testament  (5  vols.,  1904-1914),  esp.  Vol.  T,  "Beginnings  of 
Hebrew  History,"  and  Vol.  II,  "Israel's  Historical  and  Biographical  Narra- 
tives." See  also  the  large  commentaries  on  the  various  books  of  the  Old 
Testament,  especially  those  in  the  series  of  the  International  Critical  Com- 
mentary and  The  Expositor's  Bible.  For  the  relation  of  Hebrew  history  to 
general  Semitic  history,  see  A.  Jeremias,  The  Old  Testament  in  the  Light  of 
the  Ancient  East  (2  vols.,  tr.  1911)  (a  book  to  be  used  with  caution);  G,  A. 
Barton,  A  Sketch  of  Semitic  Origins,  Social  and  Religious  (1902) ;  and  the 
works  of  R.  W.  Rogers  and  Morris  Jastrow  noted  above.  For  the  general 
history  of  Israel,  see  the  monumental  works  of  H.  Ewald,  The  History  of 
Israel  (8  vols.,  tr.  1869-1886)  which,  though  old,  is  still  useful  in  many  parts. 


THE  OLD  TESTAMENT  AS  HISTORY  S5 

and  H.  Graetz,  History  of  the  Jews  (5  vols.,  tr.  1891-1898)  esp.  Vol.  I.  Other 
histories  of  the  Hebrews  are :  R.  L.  Ottley,  A  Short  History  of  the  Hebrews 
to  the  Roman  Period  (1901) ;  C.  F.  Kent,  History  of  the  Hebrew  People  (2  vols., 
1896-1897) ;  Heroes  and  Crises  of  Early  Hebrew  History  (1908) ;  Founders  and 
Rulers  of  United  Israel  (1908) ;  C.  H.  CornUl,  History  of  the  People  of  Israel  (tr 
1898,4th  ed.,  1909);  H.  P.  Smith,  Old  Testament  History  (1903);  R.  Kittel 
History  of  the  Hebrews  (2  vols.,  tr.  1895-1896) ;  H.  Guthe,  Geschichte  des  Volkes 
Israel  (3d  ed.,  1914);  W.  F.  Bade,  Tfte  Old  Testament  in  the  Light  of  Today 
(191 5).  See,  in  general,  W.  Robertson  Smith,  The  Old  Testament  in  the  Jewish 
Church  (2d  ed.,  1902).  There  is  a  short  history  of  the  higher  criticism  by 
A.  Duff,  A  History  of  Old  Testament  Criticism  (1910),  which  is  useful  for  a 
sketch  of  Jewish  antecedents.  Those  wishing  to  read  the  Bible  for  study 
purposes  should  use  the  American  Revision,  Standard  Edition  (1901). 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  PENTATEUCH 

The  Pentateuch  —  or,  to  include  Joshua,  which  really  belongs 
with  it,  the  Hexateuch,  is  composed  of  four  main  sources,  dating 
from  about  the  ninth  century  to  about  the  fourth.  Only  two  of 
these,  the  two  oldest,  are  properly  historical,  but  the  other  two, 
while  chiefly  taken  up  with  laws  and  ritual,  have  so  recast  the  text 
of  the  earlier  ones  that  all  four  must  be  considered  in  a  survey  of 
Hebrew  historiography. 

The  earliest  text,  which  runs  through  Genesis  to  Kings,  is  a 
repository  of  prehistoric  legend.  There  had  been  legends  of  the 
patriarchs  of  the  Israelites,  passed  down  by  tradition  from  the 
dimmest  antiquity.  They  were  just  like  those  of  any  other  primi- 
tive people,  tribal  legends  of  reputed  ancestors  and  heroes,  inter- 
mingled with  myths  of  tribal  religion.  Anthropology  can  match 
them  with  similar  stories  from  all  over  the  world.  They  were  kept 
alive,  apparently,  or  at  least  some  of  them  were,  by  recital  at  local 
shrines  and  holy  places,  of  which  the  land  was  full.  Every  village 
had  its  altar  for  sacrifices  to  its  divinities,  and  often  a  feast-hall 
for  the  festivities  which  followed.  There  were  sacred  groves  and 
hill-top  sanctuaries,  haunted  rocks  and  piles  of  stones ;  and  around 
each  clung  some  legend  of  the  olden  time,  some  story  of  a  hero  who 
had  once  been  there.  If  one  reads  the  narratives  of  the  patriarchs, 
even  in  the  form  in  which  we  have  them  in  Genesis  now,  one  is 
struck  with  the  continual  punctuation  of  the  stories  by  the  erection 
of  altars  and  the  dedication  of  holy  places.  Wherever  an  oath  is 
sworn,  a  sacrifice  offered,  or  a  vision  is  seen,  the  stones  are  piled 
up  for  an  altar,  which  in  most  cases  "remains  even  unto  this  day."  ^ 
Often  across  successive  editings  one  catches  the  touch  of  genuine 
local  color  in  these  incidents,  and  it  does  not  take  much  analysis 

1  For  such  mstances,  cf.  Genesis  12  ^-  »,  13  <•  ",  16  ''-^\  21  ^--^^'  ^i,  22  ",  23  1.  ^^'  2", 

24  ^2,   25  «■  1",  26  25.  32^  28  "-",  31  ".  «-«,  32  30,  33  20^  35  14.  15.  20^  ^g  S  49  3",  50  ' 

86 


THE  PENTATEUCH  87 

to  discover  in  them  the  remnants  of  myths  or  legends  of  origin,  like 
those  which  in  the  Middle  Ages  attributed  so  many  foundations 
of  churches  and  monasteries  to  the  apostles.^ 

Such  stories  —  at  least  among  primitive  peoples  —  are  not  to 
be  attributed  to  conscious  invention.  They  grow  up  of  themselves. 
One  might  almost  say  that  they  are  believed  before  they  are  told. 
The  process  of  their  fabrication  is  a  purely  social  matter  and  is  as 
much  alive  today  as  it  was  before  Moses.  How  many  colonial 
houses  have  had  a  visit  from  George  Washington,  or  have  become 
in  some  way  associated  with  him?  One  person  supposes  heroic 
incidents  may  have  happened  here,  another  thinks  they  must  and 
a  third  thinks  they  did.  If  there  are  skeptics,  they  are  soon  frowned 
down,  because  the  world  wishes  the  story.  So  Abraham  built  an 
altar  in  Shechem,^  Isaac  dug  the  well  of  Shebah,^  Jacob  piled  boun- 
dary stones  at  Gal'ed  —  or  Gilead,^  while,  above  all,  two  sacred 
mountains,  Horeb  and  Sinai,^  were  rivals  for  the  vaster  prestige 
of  being  the  scene  of  the  lawgiving  of  Moses. 

These  legends  not  only  dignified  the  locality  by  a  connection 
with  the  patriarchs  and  their  divinities,  but  they  also  enriched  the 
patriarchal  tradition  itself  with  a  wealth  of  local  detail.  The 
material  was  therefore  at  hand  for  a  great  national  saga,  which 
should  weave  the  incidents  together  in  harmony  with  the  major 
theme  of  the  origins  of  the  nation  itself,  looking  back  from  settled 
agricultural  life  to  that  of  nomadic  herdsmen  from  the  fringe  of 
the  desert  and  beyond.  Such  national  legends  must  be  large  enough 
in  scope  to  include  all  the  tribes  who  hold  themselves  akin,  and  bold 

^  C.  F.  Kent,  Student's  Old  Testament,  Vol.  I,  pp.  8-12,  classifies  the  legends  under 
the  headings  :  i.  Biographical ;  clan  and  family  legends,  with  the  family  as  the  central 
theme,  held  in  the  memory  of  wandering  tribes  for  four  or  five  centuries.  2.  Institu- 
tional, e.g.  explanatory  of  the  origin  of  Sabbath  or  Passover.  3.  Of  Sacred  Places, 
giving  the  origin  of  their  names.  4.  Of  Origin  of  Proper  Names,  e.g.  Abraham  from 
ab-hamon,  the  father  of  a  multitude.  5.  Entertaining  Stories,  e.g.  the  journey  of 
Abraham's  servant  for  Rebekah.  These  latter  were  great  favorites.  The  most  stimu- 
lating work  of  recent  times  on  these  subjects,  bringing  great  wealth  of  anthropological 
lore  to  illustrate  the  setting  of  Jewish  legend  and  cult,  is  Sir  J.  G.  Frazer's  Folk  Lore 
in  the  Old  Testament  (3  vols.,  1918). 

2  Genesis  12  ^'  ^ 

'  Genesis  26  ^^,  "Wherefore  the  name  of  the  city  is  Beer-Sheba  unto  this  day." 

*  Popularly  believed  to  be  the  etymolog^^ 

^  The  mountain  is  Sinai  in  the  accounts  of  P  and  probably  J ;  Horeb  in  E  and  D. 
Vide  infra. 


88      INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

enough  to  face  the  further  question  with  which  every  mythology 
deals  in  some  form  or  other,  the  origin  not  only  of  the  tribesmen  but 
of  the  world  itself.  Beyond  the  Nibelungen  of  this  Semitic  migra- 
tion, therefore,  there  reached  out  memories  of  pre-migration  legends 
—  the  story  of  a  flood  in  the  old  home-land  east  of  the  desert,  the 
land  of  Shinar,  or  Sumeria,  and  of  a  garden  of  Eden  where  the 
first  man  learned  the  secrets  of  the  gods.  The  patriarchal  legends 
were  thus  prefaced  with  Babylonian  creation  and  flood  myths. 

These  primitive  materials  were  worked  over  into  more  or  less 
consistent  stories  by  various  hands,  and  finally,  about  the  year 
900  B.C.,  they  were  pulled  together  by  a  genuine  master  of  narrative 
whose  text  still  furnishes  most  of  the  naive  and  picturesque  parts 
of  the  Old  Testament  from  Genesis  to  Kings.^  Since  the  distinctive 
note  and  unifying  thread  of  the  story,  following  undoubtedly  the 
trend  of  the  earlier  models,  is  not  so  much  the  fortunes  of  the  tribes- 
men as  the  way  in  which  those  fortunes  depended  upon  the  favor  of 
the  tribal  god  whose  name  is  Jahveh,^  the  unknown  author,  or 
rather  reviser,  is  known  to  scholars  by  the  simple  epithet,  "the 
Jahvist,"  or,  since  there  were  several  Jahvists,  as  "the  great 
Jahvist."  ^  The  latter  epithet  would  be  justified,  even  had  there 
been  no  need  of  contrast,  for  the  Hebrew  Herodotus  tells  his  ancient 
folk-tale  with  epic  force  and  presents  the  materials,  however  crude, 
as  they  came  to  him.  Although  his  own  conception  of  God  rises 
to  heights  of  genuine  subHmity,  such  as  those  passages  where  the 
splendor  of  Jahveh  passes  before  the  bowed  figure  of  Moses,  in 
the  cleft  of  the  mountains,  —  a  spectacle  which  calls  forth  a  lyric 
outburst  worthy  of  the  Psalms,^  —  yet  he  begins  by  repeating  the 
naive  account  of  Adam  and  Eve  in  the  garden  of  Eden,  and  God 
walking  there  in  the  cool  of  the  day,  of  the  curse  on  snakes  and  men, 
of  giants  and  demi-gods,  and  of  the  flood.  He  does  not  balk  at  any 
semi-savage  tale  such  as  that  of  Hagar  turned  off  into  the  wilder- 
ness to  die,  the  lying  cunning  of  Jacob  toward  his  father  and  brother, 

^  Except  Ruth,  which  is  a  product  of  the  Persian  or  Greek  period. 
^  The  emphasis,  as  will  appear  later,  is  upon  the  name. 

3 Or  just  "J"  for  short.  The  narrative  by  him  is  generally  so  indicated,  merely 
by  the  letter. 

*  Cf.  E.xodus  33  12-23  and  34  6-9- 


THE  PENTATEUCH  89 

etc.  Obviously  these  tales  came  down  to  him  sanctioned  by  too 
universal  acceptance  to  be  discarded,  although  belonging  to  a  lower 
grade  of  culture  and  morals  than  those  of  his  own  day.  Like 
Herodotus,  five  centuries  later,  he  left  the  ancient  stories  embedded 
in  his  own  narrative ;  but  unHke  Herodotus,  he  offered  no  sug- 
gestion that  the  fables  he  retold  were  unworthy  of  credence. 

Within  about  a  century  after  the  work  of  the  great  Jahvist,  a 
new  compilation  of  the  stories  of  the  patriarchs  appeared.  The 
source  of  the  Jahvist  had  been  Judaea  in  southern  Palestine ;  this 
was  from  the  northern  kingdom  of  Israel.  It  was  to  a  large  degree 
parallel  with  the  Jahvist,  but  with  variations  and  different  local 
touches.  Its  main  distinction,  however,  is  that  throughout  the 
narrative  of  the  patriarchs  it  does  not  use  the  name  Jahveh  at  all, 
but  refers  all  the  supernatural  element  in  it  to  Elohim,  a  word 
difficult  to  translate,  since,  like  so  much  of  the  language  of  religion, 
under  the  guise  of  primitive  vocabulary  it  carries  the  conception 
of  Divinity  on  to  higher  planes.  Elohim,  the  plural  of  Eloah, 
means  supernatural  powers  or  Power. ^  Mythologically  it  is  con- 
nected with  such  spirits  as  one  may  find  at  hill-top  altars  and 
see  if  one  sleeps  in  lonely  places,  local  or  household  gods  of  a  people 
just  emerging  from  fetishism.  This  second  of  the  prime  narratives 
of  the  Old  Testament  is  therefore  known  to  biblical  criticism  as 
the  Elohist  account.^  According  to  it,  "the  god  of  Abraham,  Isaac 
and  Jacob"  was  really  unknown  to  them,  since  they  did  not  know 
his  name,  and  not  to  know  the  name  of  a  god  in  primitive  mythology 
is  not  to  know  the  god  himself.^  In  other  words,  the  nomadic 
period,  with  its  barbarous  morals  and  low-grade  theology,  is  repre- 
sented as  a  pre-Jahvistic  age.  The  god  that  eats  his  supper  by 
the  tent  door  and  cannot  even  throw  Jacob  in  a  wrestling  match 
except  by  a  foul,  is  not  Jahveh  as  J  lightly  assumes,  for  Jahveh 

^  Cf.  the  Latin  niimina,  some  of  which  develop  later  into  del. 

2  More  often  simply  as  "E."  It  is  also  well  to  recall  that  "J,"  Jahvist,  is  now 
used  often  by  scholars  to  signify  Judaistic,  and  "E,"  Ephraimistic,  from  their  source. 

3  The  sacred  character  of  the  name  is  insisted  upon  wherever  religion  is  invested 
with  the  power  of  the  curse  or  blessing.  Anthropology  supplies  evidence  of  the  uni- 
versality of  this  belief.  The  formulas  of  blessing  or  benediction  by  the  sacred  name 
have  lost  most  of  their  primitive  meaning,  but  the  oath  still  retains  the  power  of  the 
curse. 


90    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY   OF   HISTORY 

is  a  more  exalted  deity.  The  ancestors  of  Israel,  according  to  this 
narrative,  were  worshipping  local  deities  or  their  own  protecting 
genii  in  about  the  same  way  as  the  rest  of  the  primitive  world.  It 
is  therefore  in  the  interest  of  a  higher  conception  of  Jahveh  that  the 
story  omits  his  name  from  the  crude  beginnings  of  the  age  of  mi- 
gration. According  to  the  Elohist,  Jahveh  first  definitely  appears 
in  the  national  history  after  the  period  of  nomadic  life,  at  the  second 
great  era  in  Hebrew  history,  that  of  the  conquest  and  settlement. 
It  is  at  that  dramatic  point  where  Moses  hears  the  oracle  from  the 
burning  bush,  commissioning  him  to  lead  the  Israehtes  out  of 
Egypt. ^  In  response  to  the  insistence  of  Moses,  the  god  Elohim 
at  last  reveals  his  name,  in  cryptic,  oracular  fashion :  "I  am  going 
to  be  what  I  am  going  to  be."  Thus  Jahveh  enters  definitely  into 
the  story  of  the  Elohist,  which  from  this  on  runs  along  much  Hke 
that  of  the  Jahvist.  It  differs,  however,  in  two  or  three  important 
particulars.  In  the  first  place  it  presents  a  higher  conception  of 
the  deity,  who  does  not  show  himself  bodily  to  men,  but  reveals 
himself  only  in  visions  or  by  a  voice  from  the  unseen.  He  dwells 
in  the  heavens,  which  only  a  ladder  of  dreams  can  reach,  and  —  a 
fact  of  prime  importance  —  uses  as  the  medium  of  communication 
a  special  class  of  men,  devoted  to  his  service,  gifted  with  second  sight 
and  the  power  of  miracle.  This  latter  element,  that  of  the  miracu- 
lous, thus  enters  into  the  story  to  a  marked  degree,  more  so  than 
in  the  naive  account  of  J.  For  instance,  the  waters  of  the  Red 
Sea  are  driven  back  by  a  high  wind  according  to  J ;  they  are  made 
to  divide  miraculously  at  the  touch  of  Moses'  wand,  according  to 
E.  This  enhancement  of  miracle,  introduced  to  exalt  the  dignity 
and  the  claims  of  Jahveh,  served  its  purpose  throughout  all  suc- 
ceeding centuries.  So  long  as  miracle  was  regarded  as  the  especial 
mark  of  divinity  the  more  miracle  the  Bible  could  boast  the  more 
authentic  it  seemed.  Now,  however,  in  an  age  of  science,  when 
miracles  are  disowned  on  general  principles,  the  romantic  ad- 
ditions to  the  primitive  tale  contributed  by  the  narrative  of  E 
merely  lower  its  value  as  history.  One  is  confronted  with  a  situa- 
tion similar  to  that  of  mediaeval  saint-legends,  where  the  miracles 
multiply  the  farther  one  goes  from  the  original  source,  and  multiply 
almost  according  to  formula. 

1  Exodus  3. 


THE  PENTATEUCH  91 

If  the  account  of  J  is  more  reliable  than  E  in  its  treatment  of 
incident,  —  that  is,  more  nearly  a  reflection  of  primitive  myth,  — 
the  same  is  true  of  the  treatment  of  morals.  E  toned  down  the 
cruel  and  crude  stories  of  the  olden  time,  which  J  had  allowed  to 
stand  as  tradition  had  preserved  them.  A  higher  moral  standard 
in  the  present  was  demanding  a  more  edifying  past.  Under  such 
circumstances  E,  which  apparently  began  as  an  independent  and 
parallel  compilation,  drawn  from  similar  —  or  the  same  —  sources 
as  J,  became  the  basis  for  a  revision  of  the  whole  mass  of  legend. 
For  just  as  there  were  several  Jahvists  there  were  several  Elohists, 
and  the  text  came  to  reflect  definitely  the  great  reform  of  the 
prophets  Amos  and  Hosea,  in  which  the  national  religion  was  al- 
most as  completely  recast  as  when  Christianity  broke  away  from 
it  some  seven  or  eight  centuries  later.  The  tribal  deity  —  chiefly 
a  war  god  —  who  had  replaced  the  local  divinities  through  the 
ardent  propaganda  of  the  Jahvist  prophets,  now  was  conceived  of 
in  terms  of  pure  moral  conduct.  His  true  worship  was  not  sacrifice 
but  upright  living.  Nothing  could  be  more  foreign  than  this  to 
the  ideas  of  the  olden  time  ;  then  Jahveh  had  been  the  fierce  unfor- 
giving god  of  taboo  and  ceremonial ;  now  he  was  transformed  into 
a  god  of  love  and  righteousness.  This  reconstruction  of  religion  in- 
volved a  reconstruction  of  history,  a  reconstruction  so  sweeping  as 
to  be  termed  by  some  modern  scholars  the  first  attempt  at  higher 
criticism.  The  old  tribal  story  was  recast  to  make  the  role  of 
Jahveh  more  consistent  with  the  newer  ethics,^  and,  incidentally, 
more  credible.  The  men  who  wrote  the  decalogue  —  for  the 
Elohists  were  responsible  for  the  ten  commandments  —  did  not 
hesitate  at  what  would  now  be  accounted  changing  the  records 
in  order  to  permit  them  to  insert  it  as  divine  command. 

Sometime  in  the  seventh  century  a  Judasan  author  joined  J 
and  E  into  a  single  narrative,  known  as  JE,  —  a  rather  careless 
weaving  of  the  two  strands,  not  eliminating  contradictions  and 
repetitions.  Evidently  this  bungling  performance  was  forced  upon 
the  editor  by  the  vitality  of  the  various  versions,  but  he  rather  in- 
creased than  lessened  his  difficulties  by  adding  further  variants 
from  still  other  sources.  Unsatisfactory  as  his  compilation  is  from 
the  standpoint  of  a  finished  artistic  production,  the  biblical  critic 

1  For  instance,  the  condemnation  of  the  worship  of  Jahveh  in  the  form  of  a  bull. 


92    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY    , 

is  often  grateful  that  it  is  as  poor  as  it  is ;  for  the  trace  of  the  differ- 
ent strands,  which  we  have  just  been  examining,  might  otherwise 
have  been  obHterated.  Had  Judaea  produced  a  Thucydides  for 
the  perpetuation  of  its  national  history,  capable  of  rising  to  the 
full  height  of  his  theme  and  recasting  the  fragmentary  and  uncouth 
materials  into  the  mould  of  art,  the  history  of  the  world  would  now 
be  poorer  instead  of  richer,  for  the  sources  would  have  been  lost. 

But  the  process  of  Pentateuch  authorship  was  not  complete 
with  the  final  edition  of  JE.  In  the  second  half  of  the  seventh 
century  a  new  element  was  introduced,  preserved  mainly  in  the 
book  of  Deuteronomy,  and  so  known  to  bibhcal  scholars  simply  as 
the  Deuteronomist,  —  or  D  for  short.  Although  not  narrative  in 
the  sense  of  J  or  E,  this  body  of  religious  precept  was  responsible 
for  a  yet  bolder  attempt  than  E  to  upset  much  of  the  accepted 
text,  in  order  to  swing  the  whole  in  line  with  its  exalted  outlook. 
That  the  outlook  was  really  exalted  —  the  finest  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment —  any  one  will  admit  who  reads  the  fifth  to  the  eleventh 
chapters  of  Deuteronomy  and  then  compares  them  with  the  rest 
of  the  world's  literature  before  the  climax  of  antique  civilization.^ 
In  order,  however,  to  reahze  this  high  ethical  religion  it  was  neces- 
sary to  discredit  the  crude  heathenism  which  still  persisted  at  those 
local  shrines,  at  which  J  had  gathered  so  much  of  its  narrative,  — 
the  very  shrines  which  were  set  up  by  the  patriarchs  themselves. 
D  insisted  that  Jahveh  could  be  sacrificed  to  in  one  place  only  —  the 
temple  at  Jerusalem.^  Local  altars  tend  to  a  localization  of  the  deity, 
—  as  they  do  still,  —  so  they  must  go,  and  the  priests  who  attended 
them  must  become  priests  of  Jahveh  in  his  one  and  only  temple.^ 

1  E  had  denied  that  the  cult  at  high  places  of  the  early  period  had  been  a  real  cult 
of  Jahveh.  The  Deuteronomic  reformers  now  went  much  farther.  They  denied  that 
this  hill-top  and  village  worship  could  ever  be  legitimate  in  the  religion  of  Jahveh. 

2  "The  core  of  D  is  CC.  S-ii;  12-26;  28,"  G.  F.  Moore,  The  Literature  oj  the 
Old  Testament,  pp.  58-59. 

^  Deuteronomy  18  ^-  ^.  It  proved  impossible  on  account  of  the  vested  rights  of 
the  Jerusalem  priesthood.  A  degradation  of  these  priests  to  levites  resulted  and  was 
justified  by  Ezekiel. 

This  helps  to  date  D  with  certainty.  Hosea  does  not  show  any  belief  in  the 
special  sacredness  of  the  temple.  This  doctrine  does  not  come  before  the  latter 
part  of  the  seventh  century.  But  Hosea's  influence  upon  D's  conception  of  God  is 
obvious.    Language  and  style  also  point  to  the  seventh  century. 


THE   PENTATEUCH  93 

The  reformers  had  to  find  the  justification  for  such  a  sweeping 
innovation,  which  tore  up  the  customs  of  village  life  by  the  roots, 
in  oracles  of  Jahveh  from  the  olden  time,  and  since  these  were 
lacking,  they  were  obliged  to  invent  them  to  meet  the  emergency. 
Most  of  the  invention  naturally  was  attributed  to  the  greatest 
figure  of  the  Hebrew  legends  —  Moses.  The  ancient  texts  (es- 
pecially E)  had  already  made  him  the  mouthpiece  of  Jahveh  at  a 
sacred  mountain ;  D  elaborated  his  dehverances  with  new  divine 
instructions.  This  is  the  main  change  made  by  D.  It  is  more 
law  than  history,  but  the  history  had  to  accommodate  itself  to  the 
law;  and  D  is  responsible  for  the  transformation  of  the  figure  of 
Moses  from  that  of  a  prophet  and  seer  to  that  of  the  greatest  law- 
giver of  antiquity,  a  transformation  which  was  completed  by  the 
next  and  last  of  the  four  main  contributions  to  the  Pentateuch.^ 

The  last  contribution  to  the  Pentateuch  was  written  either 
during  the  exile  at  Babylon  or  during  the  Persian  period  which 
followed.^  It  is  known  as  the  Priestly  History,  or  P  for  short,^  for 
it  reviews  the  whole  history  of  J  and  E  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
priesthood  of  the  temple.  This  is,  perhaps,  the  most  important  of  all 
the  contributions  so  far  as  the  present  text  of  the  Bible  is  concerned, 
for  it  furnishes  the  general  framework  of  history,  as  we  have  it  now. 

That  framework  is  very   remarkable.     We  are  far  removed 

^  The  book  of  Deuteronomy  came  to  light  in  the  eighteenth  year  of  the  reign  of 
Josiah.  The  story  is  told  in  II  Kings  22.  While  repairing  the  temple,  under  orders 
of  Josiah,  Hilkiah,  the  high  priest,  found  it.  "And  Hilkiah  the  high  priest  said  unto 
Shaphan  the  scribe,  I  have  found  the  book  of  the  law  in  the  house  of  the  Lord.  And 
Hilkiah  gave  the  book  to  Shaphan  and  he  read  it.  .  .  .  And  Shaphan  the  scribe  read 
it  before  the  king,  and  it  came  to  pass  that  when  the  king  had  heard  the  words  of  the 
law,  that  he  rent  his  clothes.  And  the  king  commanded  .  .  .  saying :  Go  ye,  inquire 
of  the  Lord  for  one  and  for  the  people  .  .  .  concerning  the  words  of  this  book  that  is 
found."  So  they  consulted  a  "prophetess"  who  instructed  them  to  follow  it.  Then 
(Chap.  23)  the  reform  was  inaugurated,  the  local  altars  broken,  the  groves  cut 
down,  and  all  the  sacred  places  polluted  with  dead  men's  bones  or  otherwise  profaned. 
Not  the  least  significant  incident  from  the  standpoint  of  historiography  is  the  con- 
sultation of  the  "prophetess"  to  learn  of  the  validity  of  the  law. 

2  It  is  generally  thought  to  be  the  book  of  The  Law  (Torah)  which  Ezra  brought 
back  with  him  to  Judasa  when  sent  to  Jerusalem  by  the  Persian  Artaxerxes  in  458  B.C. 
But  the  text  does  not  bear  the  mark  of  the  theological  interests  of  the  period  of  Nehe- 
miah,  —  the  especial  prohibitions  of  mixed  marriages. 

'A  better  title  is  "  The  Book  of  Origins  "  (H.  Ewald,  The  History  of  Israel,  8  vols., 
trans.  1869-1886,  Vol.  I,  pp.  74  sqq.). 


94    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

in  it  from  the  naive,  gossipy  narratives  of  the  olden  time.  Five 
hundred  years,  or  so,  had  elapsed  since  the  Jahvist  wove  together 
his  material  —  already  hoary  with  age  when  he  found  it.  In  those 
five  centuries  we  may  almost  be  said  to  pass  from  a  Froissart  or 
Gregory  of  Tours,  credulous,  simple-minded  but  a  born  raconteur, 
to  a  Hegel,  with  a  philosophy  of  history.  P  arranges  the  phenomena 
of  the  past  according  to  a  theory,  a  theory  very  similar,  indeed, 
in  general  outlines  to  that  of  Hegel.  He  finds  the  meaning  of  his- 
tory in  successive  self -revelations  by  Jahveh.  With  this  principle 
as  a  guide,  the  author  groups  the  main  incidents  of  history  around 
four  great  figures  and  into  four  great  epochs,  —  those  of  Adam, 
Noah,  Abraham  and  Moses.  Around  these  figures  all  the  different 
lines  are  made  to  converge,  the  first  three  as  ancestral  heroes,  the 
last  as  the  especial  mouthpiece  of  Jahveh.  Lines  of  genealogy  — 
P  is  responsible  for  this  dismal  element  in  the  text  —  serve  both 
to  link  the  chief  personages  and  to  indicate  the  passage  of  time.^ 
One  must  not  credit  P  with  the  imagination  necessary  for  the  in- 
vention of  so  impressive  a  scheme,  for  the  data  already  suggested 
it.  Legends  tend  to  concentrate  upon  a  few  heroic  figures  and  to 
culminate  in  dramatic  epochs.  But  what  had  been  a  natural  de- 
velopment of  the  story  became,  under  the  hand  of  P,  artificial, 
doctrinal  and  unreal.^  All  history  led  up  to  the  establishment  of 
the  temple,  all  the  fortunes  of  Israel  depended  upon  the  observance 
of  the  taboos,  codified  under  Moses.  The  prescriptions  for  the 
temple-worship  are  asserted  to  have  been  given  already  at  Sinai, 
anticipating  the  temple  itself  by  many  centuries.^    The  preroga- 

1  The  difficulties  in  this  problem  were  easily  met  by  giving  fabulous  ages  to  the 
generations  of  which  few  names  were  known.  On  the  genealogies  see  note  on  Nehe- 
miah  below,  p.  103.  P  carries  the  genealogies  from  the  Creation  to  Abraham  as 
follows :  the  generations  of  Adam,  Genesis  5 ;  of  Noah,  6  ° ;  of  the  sons  of  Noah,  10 ; 
of  Shem,  11  ^'';  of  Terah,  11 "'. 

2  A  comparison  of  the  first  chapter  of  Genesis  (by  P)  with  the  second  (by  J)  will 
show  how  far  removed  is  the  last  contribution  from  the  first,  not  only  in  matter  but 
also  in  style.  In  the  one,  creation  comes  from  the  fiat  of  a  god  who  remains  aloof 
from  his  universe ;  in  the  other  he  breathes  into  the  dust  to  make  man  live  and  then 
associates  with  him  as  a  companion.  The  style  of  P  is  here  suitable  to  his  theme, 
for  the  lack  of  detail  which  makes  the  rest  of  his  story  bald  and  dry  was  here  most 
appropriate.     Later  on  his  inferiority  is  more  apparent. 

3  All  sacrifice  except  by  the  priesthood  is  illegitimate,  hence  P  does  not  admit  that 
the  patriarchs  ever  sacrificed. 


THE  PENTATEUCH  95 

tives  of  the  priests,  —  with  their  levite  temple  servants  and  national 
tithes  for  their  support,  —  are  safeguarded  by  miracle  and  exalted 
to  dominate  the  nation  to  an  impossible  extent.  In  short,  P  is  less 
a  historian  than  an  apologist  and  theologian.  Yet  it  was  his 
account  which  gave  the  tone  to  the  completed  scriptures,  for,  some- 
time in  the  fifth  or  fourth  centuries  B.C.,  a  final  edition  fitted  the 
composite  JED  into  the  narrative  of  P  and  so  gave  us  the  text  of 
the  first  five  books  of  the  Bible. ^ 

We  must  close  this  section  of  our  survey  by  a  glance  back  at 
its  opening,  —  the  story  of  Creation.  The  first  chapter  of  Genesis 
comes  from  P,  —  an  account  written  almost  in  the  days  of  Herodo- 
tus. In  any  case  it  was  not  until  his  time  that  the  second  chapter 
(from  J)  was  added  to  the  first.  Herodotus,  too,  was  interested 
in  the  origin  of  things,  so  much  so  that  he  made  a  special  journey 
to  the  Phoenicians  to  verify  an  Egyptian  account  of  the  beginnings 
of  human  society,  where  "Hercules"  played  somewhat  the  role 
of  Jahveh.  If  ever  the  historian  is  justified  in  speculating  on  what 
might  have  been,  he  may  surely  be  allowed  the  privilege  of  con- 
ducting the  Father  of  History  the  few  miles  inland  to  Jerusalem, 
to  discuss  the  matter  with  the  author  of  Genesis !  It  is  doubt- 
ful if  the  intellectual  heritage  of  succeeding  ages  would  have  been 
much  changed  by  such  a  meeting ;  for  Herodotus  could  not  have 
guessed  that  the  mixture  of  myth  and  tribal  legend  which  the 
Jewish  historian  was  editing  would  have  been  taken  at  rather 
more  than  its  face  value  by  the  whole  of  western  civilization  for 
almost  two  millenniums,  as  the  explanation  —  the  genesis  —  of 
the  entire  world ;  and  the  Jew  could  have  understood  just  as  little 
the  rational  temper  of  his  Greek  confrere,  or  the  importance  of  his 
inquiry.  But  in  the  days  when  religion  and  history  began  once 
more  to  be  studied  by  the  comparative  method,  such  as  Herodotus 
tried  to  use,  and  the  priests  of  Egypt  and  Babylon  to  be  interro- 
gated, this  time  in  their  own  tongue,  nothing  could  match  in  interest, 
for  the  critic  of  the  Bible,  such  an  imaginary  conversation  recorded 
by  the  hand  of  Herodotus. 

1  This  is  a  simplification  of  the  actual  process,  for  the  separate  J  and  E  continued 
to  circulate  after  JE  was  made,  and  there  are  other  elements  in  the  composition  not 
covered  here. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  REMAINING  HISTORICAL  BOOKS  OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT 

The  main  sources  of  the  Pentateuch  run  on  into  the  books 
which  follow.  The  old  collections  of  traditions,  J  and  E  or  similar 
narratives,  tangle  themselves  together;  Deuteronomist  historians 
use  them  to  preach  their  lesson  that  disaster  is  always  due  to  sin 
and  especially  to  the  anger  of  Jahveh,  then  priestly  hands  insert, 
at  likely  points  in  the  narrative,  sections  —  largely  imaginative 
—  which  exalt  the  role  of  the  priesthood.  Then  comes  the  work  of 
the  author-editors,  who  throw  the  miscellany  into  approximately 
the  present  form,  a  work  which  was  not  completed  until  later. 
Since  we  have  already  seen  this  composite  process  of  authorship 
worked  out  in  some  detail  in  connection  with  the  Pentateuch,  we 
shall  pass  in  more  hurried  review  over  these  remaining  books. 

Joshua  is  so  intimately  connected  with  the  five  preceding  books 
that  it  is  now  customary  to  treat  it  along  with  them,  the  six  forming 
the  Hexateuch.  It  carries  over  into  the  conquest  the  same  elements 
as  we  have  seen  in  the  Pentateuch,  or  continuations  of  them.  The 
book  falls  rather  clearly  into  two  main  parts :  the  first  twelve 
chapters  dealing  with  the  conquest,  the  next  ten  with  the  division 
of  the  land,  while  an  appendix  of  two  final  chapters  gives  a  vale- 
dictory warning  of  Joshua  after  the  fashion  of  that  of  Moses. ^  Of 
these,  the  second  section,  that  describing  the  allotment  of  the 
tribes,  is  obviously  an  invention  emanating  from  the  same  kind  of 
priestly  imagination  of  a  late  day  as  the  P  (Book  of  Origins)  of  the 
Pentateuch,  but  the  imagination  in  this  case  became  somewhat 
too  business-like,  when  it  asserted  that  forty-eight  cities,  some  of 
them  the  best  in  the  country,  belonged  by  right  of  original  assign- 
ment to  priests  and  levites.  We  need  not  delay  long  over  that 
kind  of  ''history."  ^    The  story  of  the  conquest  is  told  by  a  Deuter- 

'  In  Deuteronomy  ss  ^~*-    Oi  course  there  are  interpolations  within  these  sections. 
2  Although  some  of  it  rests  on  older  material,  especially  E. 

96 


HISTORICAL  BOOKS  OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT      97 

onomic  moralizer/  who  used  the  two  older  sources,  continuations 
of  J  and  E,  to  suit  his  taste.  Now  these  earlier  narratives  did 
not  agree  as  to  how  the  Hebrews  conquered  Canaan,  for  the  one 
(J)  made  it  a  movement  of  scattered  war-bands,  who  settled  in 
the  open  country,  being  unable  to  take  the  walled  towns,  while 
the  other  (E)  had  a  great  tale  of  how  they  destroyed  the  Canaanites 
root  and  branch,  in  a  vast  migration,  somewhat  the  way  the  Saxon 
invaders  were  credited  in  the  old  histories  of  England  with  the 
destruction  of  the  Britons.  The  taste  of  the  Deuteronomic  editor 
—  whose  edition  was  taken  over  by  the  author  of  Joshua  —  was  for 
this  latter  source,  with  its  story  of  miracles  and  slaughter.  This 
accounts  for  such  tales  as  the  crossing  of  the  Jordan  in  which  all 
the  wonders  are  repeated  with  which  legend  had  surrounded  the 
reputed  crossing  of  the  Red  Sea,  —  waters  piled  up  and  a  march 
through  in  priestly  procession.^  It  also  accounts  for  the  story  of  ^ 
the  falling  of  the  walls  of  Jericho  at  the  sound  of  trumpets,  although 
traces  of  the  fact  that  the  city  was  taken  by  storm  in  the  ordinary 
way  are  still  to  be  detected  in  the  narrative.  The  book  of  Joshua 
frankly  cut  out  the  plain  facts  of  history  in  favor  of  heroic  legend. 
Strangely  enough,  however,  the  substance  of  the  unheroic  narrative 
(J)  was  preserved  in  another  place.  The  opening  chapter  of  Judges 
and  the  first  five  verses  of  the  second  chapter  sum  up  the  story 
of  the  conquest  as  it  probably  happened.^  There  the  truth  crops 
out  that  the  advance  of  the  Israelites  was  a  slow,  intermittent  move- 
ment, and  that  it  left  the  fortified  cities  practically  untouched, 
making  inevitable  that  racial  blend  and  intercourse  against  which 
the  prophets  of  Jahveh  were  to  protest  so  vehemently.  One  can 
see,  in  the  light  of  their  national  fanaticism,  how  natural  it  would 
be  for  writers,  saturated  in  the  doctrines  of  these  prophets,  to 
believe  in  the  exaggerated  rather  than  the  true  account  of  the  war 
upon  the  native  population.  That  is  the  explanation  for  the  rela- 
tively poor  history  of  the  book  of  Joshua. 

'  One,  that  is,  thoroughly  associated  with  the  spirit  and  style  of  the  writers  of 
Deuteronomy. 

2  The  infertility  of  the  myth-making  faculty  becomes  apparent  here.  Folk- 
lorists  are  familiar  with  this  limitation  of  the  imagination  to  a  few  staple  ex- 
ploits, which  repeat  themselves  indefinitely.  The  legends  of  the  saints  are  mostly 
alike. 

3  Subsequent  events  of  Hebrew  history  agree  with  it. 


98    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

The  book  of  Judges  begins,  as  we  have  seen,  with  the  fragments 
which  might  have  been  used  as  a  basis  for  the  opening  of  Joshua. 
The  proper  narrative  of  the  "judges"  begins  at  the  close  of  this 
short  review  of  the  conquest  and  the  death  of  Joshua.^  The  key- 
note to  the  book  is  struck  at  once.^  The  IsraeHtes  are  continually- 
forgetting  Jahveh  or  violating  his  taboos;  his  anger  is  aroused 
and  he  turns  them  over  to  spoilers;^  then  ''judges"  —  war- 
chieftains  and  petty  rulers  —  rise  to  throw  off  the  yoke ;  again 
the  people  sin,  and  again  are  given  up  to  tyrants ;  again  a  "judge" 
arises  to  smite  the  oppressor  and  to  rule  for  a  generation;  again 
comes  anarchy,  and  again  a  deliverer,  etc.,  etc.  It  is  an  eternal 
round.  Such  history  is  suspect  on  the  face  of  it.  It  is  even  more 
so  when  one  looks  at  the  chronology,  for  the  periods  of  disaster  and 
deliverance  run  regularly  for  twenty,  forty  or  eighty  years,  or 
approximately  so.  When  we  recall  that  this  chronology  runs 
through  Samuel  and  Kings,  that  the  reigns  of  David  and  Solomon 
are  each  given  as  forty  years,  which  was  reckoned  as  the  average 
length  of  a  generation  in  the  Old  Testament,  we  see  here  a  schematic 
arrangement  of  history  quite  too  regular  and  symmetrical  to  be 
true.  Each  moral  lesson  is  framed  in  a  generation.  We  do  not 
have  to  look  far  to  see  the  principles  upon  which  the  whole  is  con- 
structed. The  Deuteronomist  interpreted  tribal  wars  and  the 
anarchy  of  Bedouin-like  people  as  part  of  the  providential  scheme 
of  Jahveh,  and  it  is  a  significant  fact  that  whenever  a  theologian 
—  of  any  religion  —  has  attempted  to  use  history  to  justify  the 
ways  of  God  to  man,  he  has  the  history  rearranged  so  that  its 
artificial  character  may  convince  the  reader  that  it  was  actually 
planned!^  As  for  the  exact  time  allowed  each  judgeship,  the 
chronology  apparently  was  fixed  so  as  to  try  to  fill  in  the  four  hun- 
dred and  eighty  years  which,  according  to  I  Kings  6  ^  lay  between 
the  exodus  and  the  building  of  the  temple,  although  the  attempt 
is  not  quite  successful. 

But  if  the  main  part  of  the  book  of  Judges  ^  was  cast  into  this 
form  by  a  Deuteronomist  writer  in  the  sixth  century,  the  material 

*  Judges  2  ^.     Verses  6,  8,  g  are  literal  repetitions  from  the  last  chapter  of  Joshua. 
2  Judges  2  "-23.  3  Judges  2  "•  i^. 

*  We  come  upon  this  especially  in  the  work  of  the  Christian  historians. 
5  To  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  chapter. 


HISTORICAL  BOOKS   OF   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT      99 

which  he  used  is  genuine,  old,  legendary  stuff,  tales  of  heroes  and 
semi-savage  men,  often  unvarnished,  with  all  their  vindictive 
cruelty  and  cunning,  their  boastful  exaggeration,  both  of  prowess 
and  slaughter.  The  very  savagery  of  these  stories  is  in  their 
favor;  they  bear  the  mark  of  their  time,  and  reflect,  through 
all  their  bombast,  the  wild  age  when,  as  the  narrative  plain- 
tively repeats,  "there  was  no  king  in  Israel."  It  was  surely  a 
triumph  for  the  compiler  of  this  material  to  reduce  it,  even 
partially,  to  be  food  for  sermons.  Fortunately  he  was  still 
enough  of  a  savage  himself  not  to  rub  out  all  the  savagery  of  his 
ancestors. 

When  we  come  to  the  narrative  of  the  founding  of  the  kingdom,^ 
our  sources  work  out  in  a  remarkable  way.  The  originals  become 
both  more  reliable  and  fuller.  Contemporary  accounts  from  those 
who  knew  intimately  the  ins  and  outs  of  camp  and  court  have  been 
preserved  almost  untouched  by  subsequent  editing.  There  is 
no  such  artistic  manipulation  of  events  as  we  have  just  seen  in 
Judges,  by  seventh  or  sixth  century  reformers.  They  left  almost 
untouched  the  great  story  of  David,  because  they  could  not  have 
improved  upon  it  in  any  case.  Through  a  period  of  national 
expansion  and  successful  war,  the  worship  of  the  national  god, 
Jahveh,  was  not  likely  to  meet  with  serious  rivalry  from  the  local 
deities  of  earth  and  the  fertility  gods  —  the  Baals  —  which  in  time 
of  peace  were  continually  drawing  the  attention  of  the  farmers.^ 
The  building  of  the  temple  at  Jerusalem  was  the  logical  conclusion 
of  the  war  period  begun  by  Saul's  battles  with  the  Philistines ; 
the  war  god  was  enthroned  on  the  citadel.  Consequently  the 
later  prophets  and  priests  of  Jahveh  had  relatively  little  to  change 
in  the  sources  which  carried  the  narrative  of  J  up  to  its  fitting  and 
triumphant  conclusion,  and  we  have  fairly  contemporary  and 
unspoiled  narratives. 

Here,   therefore,   at  last  we  come  upon  the  best  product  of 

1  The  stories  of  Eli  and  Samuel  really  belong  with  those  of  the  Judges.  Even  in 
the  form  in  which  we  have  it  now,  this  connection  is  emphasized  by  the  address,  which 
Samuel  delivers  in  I  Samuel  12,  and  which  forms  a  fitting  literary  close  to  the  Judges, 
similar  to  the  addresses  of  Moses  and  Joshua.  This  at  least  seems  to  fit  one  stratum 
of  sources. 

^  C/.  G.  F.  Moore,  op.  cit.,  p.  94. 


100    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Hebrew  historiography.  The  story- telling  art  of  J  is  ^  no  longer 
working  over  the  naive  old  tales  of  Genesis,  but  deals  with  well- 
known  men  and  recent  events,  and  in  the  tale  of  the  houses  of  Saul 
and  David  we  have  something  which  will  rank  with  the  best  the 
world  can  offer.  Few  figures  from  antiquity  stand  out  more  clearly, 
in  all  their  complex  humanity,  than  that  of  David.  We  have  him 
in  all  his  weakness  as  well  as  his  strength ;  no  shocked  moralizer 
got  rid  of  his  sins  at  the  expense  of  his  character.  Legend,  which 
always  surrounds  great  men,  even  when  alive,  added  something,  so 
that  subsequent  ages  endow  him  with  extravagant  gifts  of  poetry  as 
they  did  his  son  with  equally  extravagant  gifts  of  wisdom,  but  his  per- 
sonality and  the  story  of  his  reign  remain  on  the  solid  basis  of  history. 
This  detailed,  reliable  history  runs  through  the  two  books  of  Sam- 
uel into  the  first  two  chapters  of  the  first  book  of  Kings.  But  from 
the  reign  of  Solomon  a  vastly  different  type  of  narrative  takes  its 
place.  The  events  of  four  centuries  are  chronicled  in  the  same  amount 
of  space  as  was  devoted  to  the  lifetime  of  David  alone,  and  even 
this  meagre  outline  is  blurred  by  the  Deuteronomic  editors.  For 
the  history  of  the  period  from  Solomon  to  the  Babylonian  captivity 
is  cast  in  the  same  mould  as  that  which  we  have  already  seen  in 
Judges.  Disaster  is  due  to  neglect  in  the  worship  of  Jahveh,  and 
more  especially  to  the  persistence  of  the  old  worship  in  high  places 
in  spite  of  the  claims  of  the  temple  at  Jerusalem  to  be  Jahveh 's 
sole  abode.  The  result  of  this  line  of  interpretation  of  history, 
carried  to  the  extreme,  is  that  we  have  less  a  history  of  kings  than 
a  commentary  upon  Jahveh-worship,  for  the  author  pays  little 
attention  to  the  importance  of  the  reigns  he  catalogues  except  as 
they  can  be  made  to  illustrate  the  theological  point  he  is  making. 
For  instance,  Omri,  who  founded  a  great  dynasty  in  the  Northern 
Kingdom,  is  dismissed  in  one  verse,^  although  Assyrian  inscriptions 
recognize  his  greatness  to  the  extent  of  calling  the  Kingdom  of  Israel 
Beth-Omri.^    Since  this  foimder  of  the  city  of  Samaria,  however, 

^  The  source  of  Samuel  is  so  much  in  the  spirit  of  the  J  of  the  Pentateuch  and 
Joshua,  that  the  same  symbol  is  used  for  it ;  but  that  does  not  necessarily  imply  the 
same  authorship  or  even  that  the  text  in  Samuel  is  a  continuation  of  the  J  of  the  older 
part.  But  whatever  their  relationship,  the  conception  and  style  are  so  similar  as  to 
justify  the  symbol  for  both.  ^  j  Kings  i6  -*. 

3  On  the  translation  of  this  see  R.  W.  Rogers,  Cuneiform  Parallels  to  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, p.  304,  n.  2. 


HISTORICAL  BOOKS   OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT     loi 

permitted  the  old  worship  of  the  golden  calves,  he  was  obviously 
not  an  edifying  figure  for  a  history  which  was  intended  to  prove 
that  such  heathenish  rites  spelled  disaster.  In  such  cavalier  fashion 
the  book  of  "the  Kings"  treats  the  successive  reigns  of  both  Judah 
and  Israel.  Historians  have  seldom  resisted  the  temptation  to 
draw  a  moral  from  history,  but  here  the  history  itself  was  drawn  into 
a  moral,  until  it  distorted  the  whole  perspective.^  The  fact  that 
even  today  only  biblical  scholars  are  able  to  recover  the  correct 
perspective  is  sufficient  comment  upon  the  poor  quality  of  these 
last  chapters  of  Hebrew  national  history,  and  the  critics  have  re- 
ceived most  of  their  hints  from  elsewhere  —  cuneiform  inscriptions 
and  a  study  of  the  prophets. 

From  time  to  time,  however,  through  this  mangled  chronicle, 
a  remark  is  inserted  which  excites  the  interest  of  the  historian.  The 
reign  of  Solomon  is  cut  short  with  the  remark:  "And  the  rest  of 
the  acts  of  Solomon,  and  all  that  he  did,  and  his  wisdom,  are  they 
not  written  in  the  book  of  the  acts  of  Solomon?"  ^  Similarly  at 
the  close  of  the  account  of  Jeroboam  and  Rehoboam :  "And  the  rest 
of  the  acts  of  Jeroboam,  how  he  warred  and  how  he  reigned,  behold, 
they  are  written  in  the  book  of  the  Chronicles  of  the  Kings  of 
Israel."^  .  .  .  "Now  the  rest  of  the  acts  of  Rehoboam,  and  all 
that  he  did,  are  they  not  written  in  the  book  of  the  Chronicles  of  the 
Kings  of  Judah  P""^  The  formula  occurs  practically  without  fail 
at  the  end  of  the  narrative  of  every  reign.^  This  means  that,  in  the 
eyes  of  the  author,  his  work  was  less  a  history  than  a  commentary. 
It  also  shows  us  that  from  the  days  of  Solomon,  there  were  royal 
annals,  like  those  of  Assyria,  which  were  kept  in  the  capital,  and 
that  after  the  separation  of  the  ten  tribes  under  Jeroboam,  each 
kingdom  kept  its  record.  The  Bible  does  not  preserve  these  for  us ; 
it  preserves  only  as  much  as  suited  the  priestly  and  prophetic 
writers  intent  upon  making  history  a  handmaid  to  religion.'^ 

'  Cf.  G.  F.  Moore,  op.  cil.,  p.  103,  "Some  one  has  said  that  history  is  philosophy 
teaching  by  example;  for  the  author  of  Kings  history  was  prophecy  teaching  by 
example."  The  short  survey  of  Kings  in  this  admirable  little  book  covers  the  ground 
so  thoroughly  and  satisfactorily  that  it  is  hard  to  avoid  repeating  its  treatment. 

2  I  Kings  II  ".  3  /J/^_^   14  19.  4  Ilid,^  14  29. 

6  Cf.  also  I  Kings  15  23.  31^  jg  5.  u.  27^  jj  Kings  8=3,  10  3^,  12  ^\  13  ».  ^,  14  "•  "•  ^s, 
15  6.  11,  16  19,  2020,  21  ".  25,  23  28,  24  5,  etc. 

» Other  sources  were  used  as  well  as  these  annals.    There  are  traces  of  tradition, 


I02    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

This  royal  chronicle  (referred  to  but  not  reproduced  in  the  Bible) 
marks  the  end  of  the  age  of  tradition  and  brings  us,  at  last,  into 
that  of  written  records.  The  separate  tribes  had  been  welded  into 
a  nation,  and  while  the  different  settlements  undoubtedly  preserved 
still  their  ancient  stories,  the  breaking-up  of  their  isolation  made 
the  traditions  complex,  hard  to  remember  and  more  or  less  trivial 
and  irrelevant.  The  great  feats  of  Saul  and  David  were  bound 
to  overshadow  the  less  notable  past.  So  when  the  Hebrew  system 
of  writing  came  in,  as  it  did  for  the  first  time  under  the  kingdom, 
history  developed  at  the  court  of  Solomon  in  apparently  somewhat 
the  same  official  way  in  which  we  find  it  in  the  courts  of  the  late 
Babylonian  kings.  The  legend  was  giving  way  to  annals,  romance 
yielding  to  business-like  records,  a  change  which  has  taken  place 
in  every  country  at  the  moment  when  it  begins  to  acquire  what  it 
calls  civilization. 

There  remains  only  one  other  Hebrew  history,  —  that  which 
runs  through  the  books  of  Chronicles,^  Ezra  and  Nehemiah.  This 
is  a  single  work,  written  by  one  hand,  probably  after  300  B.c.^ 
It  is  a  summary  of  the  whole  history  given  in  the  preceding  books, 
at  least  so  far  as  immediately  concerned  the  kingdom  of  Judah  and 
Jerusalem.  Its  author  uses  the  "Book  of  the  Kings  of  Judah  and 
Israel"  and  the  "Book  of  the  Kings  of  Israel"  and  other  such 
sources  which  have  since  been  lost.  He  was  evidently  a  learned 
priest  of  the  temple  at  Jerusalem,  intent  upon  its  preeminence  and 
especially  interested  in  its  liturgy.  His  exaggerations  of  the 
glory  of  the  Davidic  Kingdom  are  especially  noticeable,  but  for 
that  matter  the  work  is  not  important  as  history  until  we  leave  the 
book  of  Chronicles  and  come  to  Ezra. 

The  two  books  of  Ezra  and  Nehemiah  are  really  one,^  and  bear 
the  title  Ezra  in  the  Jewish  Bible.  This  contains  the  history  of 
the  Jews  from  the  Persian  release  to  the  coming  of  Alexander.  Its 
main  interest  for  us,  however,  lies  less  in  its  value  as  source  material 

and  especially  there  are  the  heroic  legends  of  the  prophets  Elijah  and  Elisha.  Other 
literary  sources  may  be  detected. 

'  The  name  Chronicon  was  Jerome's  rendering  of  the  Hebrew  title  "  Events  of 
the  Times." 

2  Vide  Dictionary  of  the  Bible  (edited  by  J.  Hastings,  i898-i904),Vol.  I,  pp.  289  sqq. 

8  The  division  seems  to  have  been  due  to  Christians,  later. 


HISTORICAL  BOOKS   OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT     103 

to  the  modern  historian  than  in  the  unique  personal  memoirs  of 
Nehemiah  and  Ezra  which  have  been  embedded  in  the  narrative. 
In  spite  of  the  fact  that  they  were  sadly  mutilated  in  the  process 
of  fitting  them  in,  these  two  documents  remain  unique  in  Hebrew 
and  perhaps  in  antique  historiography.  The  memoirs  of  Nehemiah 
are  especially  fine.  The  restorer  of  Jerusalem  gives  no  petty  copy 
of  the  vainglorious  boasting  of  Assyrian  kings  when  they  recited 
their  great  deeds.  Instead,  he  seems  to  have  kept  a  remarkably 
sane  appreciation  of  the  proportion  of  things.  His  sense  of  the 
importance  of  what  he  is  doing  does  not  conceal  the  fact  that  he  is 
deahng  with  petty  tribal  neighbors,  who  could  end  it  all  if  he 
would  stray  over  to  one  of  their  villages.^  Homely  detail  lifts  the 
story  into  that  realm  of  realism,  which  only  really  great  writers 
can  risk  entering  without  loss  of  authority .^  The  result  is  one  of 
the  most  graphic  pictures  in  the  Bible,  sketched  in  a  few  words. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  building  of  the  wall:  ''They  which  builded 
on  the  wall  and  they  that  bare  burdens,  .  .  .  every  one  with  one 
of  his  hands  wrought  in  the  work  and  with  the  other  held  a  weapon. 
.  .  .  And  he  that  sounded  the  trumpet  was  by  me.  ...  So  we 
labored  in  the  work,  and  half  of  them  held  the  spears  from  the 
rising  of  the  morning  till  the  stars  appeared."  ^ 

The  memoirs  of  Ezra  are  of  an  inferior  quality  to  this.  Their 
significance  in  Hebrew  historiography  lies  mainly  in  their  content. 
For  as  Nehemiah  tells  how  he  built  the  Jews  a  city  to  be  safe  from 
their  neighbors,  Ezra  tells  how  he  kept  them  apart  from  these  same 
neighbors  by  refusing  to  admit  intermarriage,^  and  then,  in  the 

^  One  possible  piece  of  exaggeration  seems  to  be  the  statement  that  the  walls  were 
completed  in  fifty-two  days.  Josephus,  relying  on  other  sources,  says  it  took  two  years 
and  four  months.  Cf.  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  XI,  Chap.  V,  Sect.  8.  But  a  prelimi- 
nary wall  may  have  been  built,  or  the  text  may  have  been  corrupted. 

2  His  interest  in  economic  matters  is  especially  noteworthy.  Cf.  Nehemiah  s 
and  the  laws  codified  in  Leviticus  25  '^""^^. 

3  Nehemiah  4  ^^^i.  More  realistic  still  is  the  twenty-third  verse :  "  So  neither 
I  nor  my  brethren  nor  my  servants  nor  the  men  of  the  guard  which  followed  me,  none 
of  us  put  off  our  clothes,  except  that  every  one  put  them  off  for  washing."  Was  the 
last  verse  a  later  emendation? 

^  This  exclusive  policy  of  Ezra,  it  has  been  pointed  out,  was  likely  to  emphasize 
the  question  of  descent  and  so  to  call  forth  an  interest  in  genealogies.  We  see  the 
effect  of  this  in  Nehemiah  7  {cf.  verse  61),  where  a  list  of  what  one  might  term  pure- 
blooded,  patrician  Jewish  families  is  given.  One  recalls  in  this  connection  the  fact 
that  P,  which  is  attributed  to  the  time  of  Ezra,  was  responsible  for  the  long  genealogies 


I04    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

year  443  or  444,  brought  forth  a  book  which,  if  tradition  and  the 
surmise  of  modern  scholarship  be  correct,  centred  the  whole  world's 
history  at  their  very  temple.^  Whatever  the  exact  book  was  which 
he  expounded,  subsequent  Jewish  tradition  believed  that  it  was 
nothing  short  of  epoch-making,  and  the  name  of  Ezra,  or  Esdras, 
became  the  greatest  among  the  scribes.^ 

The  books  of  Chronicles,  Ezra  and  Nehemiah  contain  these 
rich  historical  materials ;  but  their  compiler  should  have  little 
credit  for  his  share  in  their  preservation.  His  editorial  task  was 
done  as  clumsily  and  unintelligently  as  his  chronicle  is  biassed  and 
dry.  One  fact,  however,  we  can  deduce  from  his  narrative,  which 
enables  us  to  state  the  conclusion  of  the  long  process  of  cooperative 
authorship  by  which  the  Bible  story  was  finally  made.  As  the 
chronicler  apparently  used  the  Pentateuch,  Joshua,  Judges,  Samuel 
and  Kings  in  that  order,  it  seems  likely  that  by  about  300  B.C.  they 
had  already  been  put  together  in  the  form  in  which  we  have  them 
now. 

This  ends  our  survey  of  what  are  commonly  known  as  the 
historical  books  of  the  Old  Testament,  although  it  by  no  means 
covers  the  field  of  interest  to  the  historian.  For  in  the  other 
works,  especially  in  the  prophetic  writings,  there  are  narratives  of 
prime  importance,  if  only  secondarily  historical.  The  memoirs 
of  a  governor  like  Nehemiah  are  fully  matched,  for  instance,  by  the 
biography  of  Jeremiah,  preserved  by  his  friend  and  secretary, 
Baruch.^  Taken  in  its  setting,  along  with  the  words  of  the  prophet, 
this  is  a  human  document  of  the  first  order.  In  personal  self- 
revelation  and  high  religious  feeling  it  has  not  unaptly  been  com- 


of  the  earlier  historical  books.  Evidently  the  reestablished  Jews  were  working  up 
their  ancestry  with  great  eagerness.  It  should  be  noted,  however,  that  there  is  a 
reference  in  Ezekiel  13  ^  to  registers  of  "the  house  of  Israel,"  at  the  beginning  of  the 
exile.     Cf.  Josephus,  Against  Apion,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  V  sqq. 

1  The  narrative  of  P,  based  upon  the  teachings  of  Ezekiel.  Cf.  supra,  p.  94.  Thus 
the  Jews  began  again  their  national  existence,  self-centred  and  isolated,  with  relatively 
slight  intercourse  with  the  gentile  world. 

2  A  considerable  literature  grew  up  in  his  name,  and  a  late  tradition  went  so  far 
as  to  regard  him  as  the  restorer  of  the  law,  the  author  of  some  seventy  works,  and 
finally  as  the  last  of  writers  in  the  canon  of  the  Old  Testament. 

8  Cf.  Jeremiah  32,  36  *  sqq.,  43  ',  45,  etc. 


HISTORICAL  BOOKS  OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT     105 

pared  with  the  Confessions  of  Augustine.  There  are  similar  poetic 
or  reahstic  gHmpses  of  the  life  of  the  time  and  the  policy  of  rulers 
throughout  most  of  this  prophetic  literature ;  but  however  much 
it  affected  history  its  purpose  was  not  historical  and  we  must 
leave  it  aside. 

There  is,  finally,  one  supremely  good  piece  of  historical  writing 
in  that  considerable  body  of  Jewish  literature  which  is  not  included 
in  the  Old  Testament  as  known  to  Protestant  readers.     The  first 
book  of  Maccabees  is  a  stirring  narrative  of  the  most  heroic  days 
of  the  Jewish  nation,  a  straightforward  account,  gathered  from  eye- 
witnesses^ and  from  written  sources,  of  the  great  war  of  liberation 
begun  by  Judas  Maccabaeus  in  which  the  newly  vitalized  hopes  of 
the  Jews  were  actually  reahzed  for  a  period,  and  political  was 
added  to  rehgious  Hberty.     The  history  of  this  achievement  is 
given  with   scientific  scruple,  and   in   minuteness  of   detail   and 
accuracy  of  information  it  ranks  high  among  any  of  the  histories 
of  antiquity.     One  appreciates  these  qualities  all  the  more  when 
one  turns  to  the  second  book  of  Maccabees  and  sees  how  the  same 
kind  of  detail  is  marred  by  inaccuracy  and  distorted  by  partisan- 
ship, until  the  book  becomes  a  mere  historical  pamphlet  for  the 
Pharisees.     The  fundamental  difference  between  the  two  books 
is  that  in  the  first,  religious  interests  yield  to  the  historical,  while 
in  the  second  they  yield  to  nothing.     It  is  the  same  contrast  which 
we  have  met  time  and  again,  of  a  book  that  tells  the  truth  as  over 
against  one  that  is  meant  to  edify.     But  then  the  latest  phase  of 
pre-Christian  Jewish   thought  passed   farther   and   farther   away 
from  scientific  interest  in  the  facts  of  a  past  which  offered  no  more 
triumphs  to  record,  and  turned  from  the  humiliation  of  reality 
to  that  bright  dreamland  of  hope,  the  kingdom  of  the  Messiah, 
The  two  great  eras  of  David  and   the   Maccabees  had   produced 
histories  worthy  of  the  deeds  they  recorded  ;  but  the  last  sad  age  of 
Jewish  national  life  consoled  itself  with  apocalyptic  visions  and 
prophecies  of  the  future.     In  such  a  situation,  the  genuine,  old 
histories  themselves  suffered  as  well.    They  were  plundered  for 
texts  to  buttress  belief,  and  history  suffered  that  faith  might  live. 

^  Although  written  in  the  second  generation  after  the  event. 


io6    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

The  significance  of  this  conclusion  of  our  survey  of  Hebrew 
historiography  should  not  escape  us,  nor  should  it  be  misinter- 
preted. It  is  a  saddening  paradox  that  the  higher  we  treasure 
ideals  the  more  likely  are  we  to  violate  others  for  them.  The 
historian  devotes  himself  to  the  discovery  and  preservation  of  the 
truth.  By  the  truth  he  means  an  objective  fact  or  an  assemblage 
of  such  facts.  He  is  apt  to  forget  that  this  objectivity  upon  which 
he  insists  as  the  very  basis  of  their  reality  does  not  exist  for  those 
who  actually  use  or  have  used  the  facts.  Hence  when  he  finds 
high-minded  moralists  plundering  the  data  of  the  past  to  point 
their  morals,  he  loses  respect  for  both  their  history  and  their  ethics, 
without  having  considered  the  possibility  that  the  non-historical 
attitude  might  conceivably  have  a  justification.  No  one  could 
pretend  that  the  violation  of  historical  standards  of  truth  could  be 
excused  today  on  any  basis  of  morals ;  for  in  our  appreciation 
of  the  value  of  scientific  work  we  recognize  —  in  theory  —  nothing 
higher  than  truth.  But  in  the  pre-scientific  world,  where  few  of 
the  data  were  established  with  absolute  certainty,  the  case  was 
different.  The  idea  of  objective  historical  truth  could  have  only 
a  limited  appeal,  since  the  medium  for  the  preservation  of  fact 
was  so  imperfect.  We  have  spoken  elsewhere  of  the  stimulus 
to  accuracy  in  modern  scholarship  owing  to  the  consciousness  that 
others  are  on  our  trail.  But  the  heightening  of  the  value  of  facts 
brings  with  it  a  certain  unhistorical  failure  to  appreciate  why  they 
should  have  been  so  lightly  esteemed  by  men  who  are  apparently 
inspired  by  as  high  ideals  —  so  far  as  morals  go  —  as  the  modern 
critic. 

This  is  the  problem  which  confronts  the  critic  of  Hebrew  history. 
For  those  who  wrote  the  Pentateuch  and  the  books  of  histories, 
who  edited  out  their  diverse  sources  and  gave  them  their  final  form, 
there  was  something  in  the  world  worth  more  than  annals  of  the 
past.  The  forces  of  the  future  were  in  their  hands,  forces  which 
determined  the  fate  not  only  of  Jewish  history  but  of  the  religious 
outlook  of  the  whole  world.  The  prophets  of  the  eighth  century 
were  those  great  innovators  who  made  religion  over  from  a  set  of 
taboos  to  a  moral  code,  and  substituted  upright  living  for  sacrifice. 
It  is  small  wonder  if  the  legends  of  the  past  were  made  over  as  well 
into  a  form  to  suit  the  new  outlook.     Their  own  work  was  of  vastly 


HISTORICAL  BOOKS   OF  THE   OLD  TESTAMENT     107 

more  importance  to  the  men  who  wrote  under  the  new  inspiration, 
than  the  crude  details  of  an  uncertain  past.  For  the  modern 
critic  to  fail  to  appreciate  the  point  of  view  of  these  Hebrew  histo- 
rians is  as  grave  a  sin  in  historical  criticism  as  to  fail,  on  the  other 
hand,  to  see  the  damage  they  wrought  in  the  ancient  sources.  It 
was  a  point  of  view  which  has  much  to  justify  it  too ;  for  but  for 
the  work  of  those  prophets  who  sought  to  carry  Israel  away  from 
its  primitive  line  of  history  into  new  and  unhistorical  ideals,  the 
history  of  Israel  would  never  have  been  worth  bothering  over  at 
all  —  except  as  that  of  an  obscure  Oriental  people  who  contributed 
next  to  nothing  to  civilization.  In  the  same  way,  if  the  believers  in 
a  coming  Messiah  plundered  the  documents  of  the  past,  the  plunder 
was  used  for  no  less  a  purpose  than  the  documentation  of  the 
kingdom  of  Christ.  In  short  it  was  the  distorters  of  Hebrew 
history  who  made  that  history  worth  our  while ! 

Yet  the  fact  remains  that,  from  our  point  of  view,  the  history 
was  distorted.  The  paradox  is  not  an  antithesis  between  history 
and  morals,  however,  or  between  science  and  religion,  or  science 
and  theology.  It  is  simply  the  statement  of  the  difference  between 
the  ideals  of  the  scientific  and  the  pre-scientific  eras. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  FORMATION  OF  THE  CANON 

There  still  remains  the  question  of  how  this  mass  of  Hebrew 
writings  took  the  form  and  shape  in  which  it  is  known  to  us,  as  the 
Old  Testament.  The  process  was  a  long  and  slow  one,  and  part  of 
it  has  already  been  traced  above.  We  recall  how  the  legends  of 
the  earhest  days  were  first  thrown  into  connected  written  narrative 
in  the  eighth  or  ninth  century  B.C.,  in  the  schools  of  the  prophets, 
as  J  and  E,  how  then  in  the  close  of  the  seventh  century  they  were 
combined  (JE) ;  how,  about  the  same  time,  a  code  was  prepared  in 
Jerusalem  in  the  name  of  Moses  (D),  then  promulgated  in  the 
eighteenth  year  of  the  reign  of  Josiah  (621  B.C.)  and  shortly  after- 
ward combined  with  the  history  (JED)  ;^  how  during  the  exile  a  new 
ritual-law,  traced  to  the  influence  of  Ezekiel,  was  responsible  for  a 
new  and  thoroughgoing  recasting  of  the  narrative  from  a  priestly 
standpoint  (P)  and  then  how,  after  various  changes,  the  whole  com- 
posite mass  became  our  Hexateuch.  One  might  expect  from  this, 
that  the  books  of  the  Jews  would  go  on  developing,  modified  to  the 
changing  needs  of  successive  ages,  and  so,  to  a  certain  extent,  they 
did.  But  there  was  one  influence  making  strongly  against  change. 
The  texts  themselves  became  sacred.  The  use  of  the  Law,  as  the 
five  "books  of  Moses"  were  termed,  by  the  priests  in  the  actual 
administration  of  justice  may  have  had  something  to  do  in  this 
process  of  crystalKzation,  but  a  deeper  reason  lies  in  the  very 
mystery  of  "the  written  word,"  which  attains  an  undue  authority 
over  all  primitive  minds  and  holds  its  tyranny  even  in  the  modern 
world  of  encyclopaedias  and  newspapers.  What  is  written  attains 
a  life  of  its  own,  and  only  here  and  there  can  one  find  the  unfeeling 
skeptic  indifferent  to  its  fate.  But  when  the  word  that  is  written 
is  regarded  as  the  utterance  of  God,  —  as  in  practically  all  early 

'  This  incidentally  shows  how  highly  the  historical  texts  were  regarded,  that  D 
should  be  united  with  them.     For  D  came  with  authority. 

108 


THE  FORMATION  OF  THE  CANON  109 

codes  of  law,  —  the  skeptic  has  little  chance  to  commit  his  sac- 
rilege.* 

In  Israel  this  respect  for  the  scriptures  attained  the  dignity  of  a 
separate  superstition,  one  which  was  destined  to  cast  its  influence 
over  the  whole  subsequent  history  of  Jewish  and  of  Christian 
thought.  The  early  scribes  had  felt  free  to  arrange  and  annotate 
the  law  as  part  of  their  work.  Indeed,  as  we  have  seen,  the  law 
itself  was  a  product  of  repeated  revision  and  rectification.  But 
from  about  the  middle  of  the  fifth  century  it  became  fixed  and  rigid,^ 
the  object  of  religious  reverence  which  protected  itself  by  an  en- 
larged use  of  old  taboos.  The  books  of  "the  Prophets,"  —  includ- 
ing, it  will  be  recalled,  the  earlier  histories,  —  were  stereotyped  into 
their  canon  by  about  two  centuries  later,  about  250  B.C.  The  two 
lessons  read  in  the  synagogue  were  drawn,  one  from  the  law,  the 
other  from  the  prophets,  so  that  the  latter  shared  inevitably  the 
fate  of  the  former.  The  "scriptures,"  or  "hagiographa,"  were 
not  so  easily  moulded  into  place.  The  rabbis  disputed  long  over 
what  ones  to  accept,  and  were  unable  to  come  to  final  conclusions 
until  after  the  Christians  had  begun  to  plunder  the  sacred  arsenal 
for  their  revolt. 

The  difficulty  lay  in  the  test  of  inclusion  or  exclusion,  which 
was  not  subject-matter  but  authorship.  Only  those  scriptures 
were  to  be  admitted  which  had  been  written  by  God,  through 
inspired  mediums  as  in  the  case  of  Law  and  Prophets.  Such  a 
test,  however,  made  disagreement  inevitable,  since  there  was  no 
ready  way  of  establishing  or  denying  the  inspiration.  History  has 
never  discovered  other  than  two  possible  fines  of  evidence  for 
assigning  authorship :  external  evidence,  such  as  that  of  witnesses 
who  were  present  when  the  work  was  written  or  had  access  to 
knowledge  as  to  how  it  was  written,  and  internal  evidence  from 
the  nature  of  the  text.  Although  it  was  obviously  presumptuous, 
involving  the  danger  of  blasphemy,  for  any  man  to  use  the  second 
test  consciously,  since  he  would  in  the  circumstances  be  making 
himself  judge  of  what  God  should  be  credited  with  saying  and  what 

'  The  same  authority  may  attach  to  spoken  words,  but  their  reporters  are  bound 
to  modify  them  in  terms  of  their  own  time  and  thought.  The  beliefs  about  the  logos 
occur  to  one  in  this  connection. 

2  Cf.  Nehemiah,  8-10. 


no    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

not,  nevertheless  what  could  not  be  risked  by  the  individual  was 
done  by  the  mass.^  A  consensus  fidelium,  that  "agreement  among 
all  those  who  believe,"  was  arrived  at,  as  is  the  case  with  all  doc- 
trines truly  catholic.  In  this  process,  however,  the  external  test 
of  authorship  was  used  to  an  extent  which  really  led  to  a  study  of 
the  contents  of  the  books  involved.  The  books,  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted, were  already  prepared  for  such  a  test,  or  readily  adjusted 
themselves  to  it.  In  arrangement  of  time  and  circumstance,  and 
miraculous  evidences  of  the  presence  of  the  divine  Author,  the 
later  books  even  protested  somewhat  too  much,  as  the  apocalyptic 
literature  shows.  Two  historical  devices  were  also  used  :  ascribing 
books  to  authors  already  accepted  in  the  canon  as  inspired,  and  the 
antedating  of  works  to  give  them  greater  claim  upon  the  credulity 
of  the  present.  Psalms  which  were  perhaps  written  as  late  as  the 
Maccabean  struggle  were  grouped  with  older  ones,  —  all  possibly 
being  later  than  the  Exile,  —  and  attributed  to  David.  Solomon 
was  made  responsible  for  wisdom  of  a  later  day,  and  thus  poetry 
and  proverb  enriched  the  history  of  the  royal  period  with  a  new  and 
sophisticated  myth.  More  interesting  still  to  the  historian  is  the 
antedating  of  prophecy,  such  as  that  of  the  book  of  Daniel.  We 
know  from  its  contents  that  it  was  written  in  the  time  of  Antiochus 
Epiphanes  (175-164  B.C.),  yet  it  purports  to  come  from  the  days 
of  Nebuchadnezzar,  over  four  centuries  earlier.  Upon  the  whole 
the  exigencies  of  the  situation  produce  a  somewhat  bewildering 
misappropriation  of  texts.  But  no  higher  critics  were  at  hand,  and 
the  canon  of  the  Old  Testament  was  framed,  —  for  two  religions.^ 

1  This  is  an  excellent  example  of  a  most  important  principle,  familiar  to  sociologists 
and  anthropologists,  but  strangely  ignored  by  historians.  All  the  world's  history  is 
affected  by  it.  We  have  ordinarily  considered  it  as  belonging  exclusively  to  a  myth- 
making  stage  of  society ;  but  we  are  still  making  myths  and  resting  content  with  our 
consensus  fidelium. 

2  The  authoritative  form  was  apparently  settled  for  the  Jews  at  a  congress  or 
council  of  rabbis  held  at  Jamnia,  the  successor  to  destroyed  Jerusalem,  in  the  year 
90  A.D.  Josephus,  however,  in  his  book  Against  Apion  (Bk.  I,  Chap.  VIII),  written 
93~95  A.D.,  states  that  the  Old  Testament  has  22  books,  whereas  the  regular  Jewish 
version  has  24.  They  are :  the  five  books  of  the  Law ;  eight  books  of  "  Prophets,"' 
including  Joshua,  Judges,  Samuel,  and  Kings,  "the  twelve"  major  prophets,  and  the 
minor  prophets,  the  latter  as  one  book;  and  eleven  books  of  "Scriptures,"  Psalms, 
Proverbs,  Job,  Song  of  Songs,  Ruth,  Lamentations,  Ecclesiastes,  Esther,  Daniel,  Ezra 
and  Nehemiah  together,  Chronicles.  The  Christians,  by  dividing  Samuel,  Kings, 
Ezra,  and  Chronicles  and  counting  the  rest  separately,  reckon  thirty-nine  books. 


THE   FORMATION   OF   THE    CANON 


III 


The  decisions  of  the  rabbis  enabled  the  Christians  in  their  turn 
to  meet  pagan  criticism  entrenched  behind  a  sacred  text,  and  no 
greater  tribute  could  be  paid  to  the  work  of  rabbi  and  theologian, 
or,  perhaps,  to  the  weakness  of  the  critical  attitude  in  man,  than 
that  from  that  day  of  warring  creeds  to  the  present  the  citadel  of 
faith  and  inspiration  has  held  against  the  assaults  of  inquiry  and 
historical  skepticism,  and  still  asserts  an  almost  undiminished  sway. 
The  early  Christians,  however,  did  not  at  first  pay  any  very  strict 
attention  to  the  opinions  of  the  rabbis  as  to  which  of  the  ''scrip- 
tures" were  canonical  and  which  were  not.  They  were  eager  for 
them  all,  especially  for  those  that  bore  Messianic  prophecy;  which 
put  a  premium  upon  some  of  the  very  ones  which  the  rabbis  were 
inclined  to  discard.  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  test  of  authorship  as 
over  against  that  of  the  contents  of  writings  again  broke  down. 
A  new  consensus  fidelium  had  to  be  satisfied.  "The  Christians 
discovered  no  reason  in  the  books  themselves  why  Esther,  for  ex- 
ample, should  be  inspired  and  Judith  not;  or  why  Ecclesiastes, 
with  its  skepticism  about  the  destiny  of  the  soul,  should  be  divinely 
revealed,  and  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon,  with  its  eloquent  defence  of 
immortality,  a  purely  human  production ;  or,  again,  why  the 
Proverbs  of  Solomon  were  Scripture,  and  the  Proverbs  of  Ben 
Sira  (Ecclesiasticus)  nothing  but  profane  wisdom."  ^  Christian 
scholarship  did  not  challenge  this  process  until  Jerome  prepared  his 
famous  text  at  the  close  of  the  fourth  century. 

The  mention  of  Jerome  suggests  the  last  problem  to  be  con- 
sidered, the  origin  of  the  text  as  we  have  it  now.  The  Christians 
used  the  Greek,  not  the  Hebrew  Bible.  This  had  been  translated 
into  the  Greek  from  the  Hebrew,^  by  Jews  of  Alexandria.  Legend 
had  it,  as  also  recorded  in  Josephus,^  that  the  law  was  translated  in 
seventy-two  days  by  seventy-two  persons ;  hence  the  name  Sep- 
tuagint  *  by  which  the  Greek  Old  Testament  became  known.     In 

1  G.  F.  Moore,  The  Literature  of  the  Old  Testament,  p.  14.  Cf.  C.  A.  Briggs,  General 
Introduction  to  the  Study  of  the  Holy  Scriptures  (1899),  pp.  118  sqq.,  and  articles  in  Ency- 
clopcedia  Britannica  and  Hastings'  Dictionary  of  the  Bible. 

^  A  few  chapters  in  Ezra  (4  ^-6  '^)  and  Daniel  (2  •'-7)  are  in  Aramaic. 

^  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  II. 

^  From  the  Latin,  septuaginta,  seventy.  The  name  strictly  speaking  is  applicable 
only  to  the  Pentateuch.  But  it  was  loosely  extended  to  cover  the  whole  of  the  Old 
Testament. 


112    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

reality  it  was  the  work  of  different  scholars  through  different  ages, 
and  was  probably  not  completed  before  the  second  century  B.C. 
It  was  from  this  Greek  text  that  the  Christian  Bible  was  drawn  at 
first.  During  the  second  and  third  century  there  was  some  stir- 
ring among  Christian  scholars  to  have  a  Hebrew  collation.  The 
greatest  of  these  scholars,  Origen,  drew  up  a  collection  of  six  parallel 
texts,^  but  it  was  Jerome  who  set  to  work  actually  to  procure  a 
reliable  Latin  translation  for  common  use  in  the  West,  based  upon 
Hebrew  texts,  in  the  notion  that,  being  Hebrew,  they  were  more 
genuine  than  the  Greek  version,  —  a  notion  which  turned  out  to 
be  mistaken,  however,  since  the  Septuagint  was  in  reality  from 
older  Hebrew  texts  than  those  used  by  him.  In  preparing  this 
edition,  Jerome  took  the  Jewish  point  of  view  as  to  what  books 
should  be  included  as  inspired  and  what  ones  should  not,  thus 
denying  the  canonicity  of  scriptures  which  were  in  constant  use, 
and  modifying  texts  by  his  new  translation  to  the  disturbance  of  the 
faith  of  behevers,  —  as  Augustine,  Bishop  of  Hippo,  ventured  to  ad- 
monish him. 2  The  Church  of  the  Middle  Ages  in  general  tended  to  fol- 
low the  liberal  view  of  the  churchman  rather  than  the  narrower  inter- 
pretation of  the  scholar,  and  when  Luther,  and  Protestantism  follow- 
ing him,  made  the  Hebrew  Bible  the  test,  reverting  to  the  position  of 
Jerome,^  the  Catholic  Church  at  Trent  declared  on  the  other  hand 
that  these  works,  e.g.  Tobit,  Judith,  Wisdom,  Ecclesiasticus  and  the 
Maccabees,  were  an  intrinsic  part  of  the  canonical  scriptures,  adding 
the  usual  sanction  —  *'  If  any  man  does  not  accept  as  sacred  and 
canonical  these  books,  entire,  with  all  their  parts,  as  they  have  been 
customarily  read  in  the  Catholic  Church  and  are  contained  in  the 
ancient  common  Latin  edition  ...  let  him  be  anathema."  ^ 

1  The  famous  Hexapla.  They  were :  (i)  The  Hebrew  Text,  (2)  Transliteration 
of  Hebrew  Text  into  Greek  Letters,  (3)  Greek  versions  of  Aquila,  (4)  of  Symmachus, 
(s)  of  the  Septuagint,  (6)  of  Theodotion;  3,  4,  and  6  are  from  the  second  century  a.d. 

2  This  correspondence  between  Augustine  and  Jerome  offers  an  illuminating  sec- 
tion in  Christian  historiography.  Augustine  not  only  stood  for  the  traditional  text, 
he  was  in  favor  of  the  traditional  inclusion  of  Judith,  Tobit,  First  and  Second  Macca- 
bees, Ecclesiasticus  and  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon.  Cf.  De  Doctrina  Christiana,  Bk.  II, 
Chap.  VIII,  written  397  a.d. 

3  Luther  placed  the  Apocrypha  between  Old  and  New  Testaments,  with  this 
further  caption,  "Books  that  are  not  equally  esteemed  with  the  Holy  Scriptures,  but 
nevertheless  are  proiitable  and  good  to  read." 

*  In  the  fourth  session. 


THE   FORMATION   OF   THE   CANON  113 

It  is  easy  to  see  how  the  skeptics  of  the  eighteenth  century 
might  reverse  the  doubt  of  the  early  Christians  and  demand  not 
why  one  should  limit  the  list  of  inspired  books  but  why  one  should 
regard  any  of  them  as  inspired  at  all.  Such  doubts  made  possible 
genuine  textual  criticism,  which  began  with  Astruc  in  the  eighteenth 
century.  The  development  of  philology  and  archaeology  supphed 
the  tools  for  the  two-fold  task  of  textual  studies  on  the  one  hand 
and  of  external  comparison  with  the  rest  of  ancient  history  upon 
the  other,  with  the  result  that  we  now  know  more  of  how  the  Bible 
was  put  together  than  the  very  scribes  who  copied  or  rabbis  who 
used  it  in  the  immemorial  service  of  the  ancient  synagogue ;  as  we 
know  more  of  the  history  of  Israel  than  the  very  authors  who  com- 
piled its  last  revision. 


CHAPTER  XI 
NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;   JOSEPHUS 

The  very  process  we  have  just  been  describing  implies  that  we 
have  only  a  portion  of  the  literature  of  the  Jews  inside  the  canon 
of  the  sacred  scriptures.  It  remains  to  glance  at  what  hes  outside 
it,  and  finally  at  the  work  of  a  purely  secular  historian  who  wrote 
at  Rome,  for  the  Greco-Roman  world,  the  story  of  Jewish  antiquity 
and  the  struggle  for  Jewish  freedom,  Josephus. 

The  two  chief  characteristic  products  of  Jewish  thought,  legalism 
and  prophecy,  which  we  have  seen  coloring  with  more  or  less  dif- 
ferent hues  the  long  perspectives  of  biblical  antiquity,  continued 
to  determine  the  quality  of  the  non-biblical  literature  to  a  very 
large  degree.  The  result  is  that  that  literature  largely  consists  of 
two  great  developments,  corresponding  to  these  two  interests  :  the 
elaboration  of  the  law  in  the  Talmud  and  the  production  of  apoc- 
alyptic literature.  How  great  these  two  developments  were  is 
something  of  which  Christians  are  generally  grossly  ignorant; 
and  yet  no  student  of  New  Testament  history  can  ever  quite  get 
the  sense  of  the  setting  of  primitive  Christianity,  of  the  forces 
which  it  had  to  fight  and  even  of  those  which  it  incorporated,  until 
he  has  looked  into  the  teachings  of  the  rabbis  or  realized  the  scope 
of  the  poetic,  rhapsodical  dreams  of  Oriental  imaginations  fired 
by  fanatic  zeal,  that  were  prevalent  in  the  closing  days  of  Judaism. 

The  great  body  of  the  "oral"  law,  as  opposed  to  the  "written" 
law  of  Moses,  was  preserved,  elaborated  and  debated  by  the  rabbis, 
just  as  the  Christian  church  has  its  bodies  of  ecclesiastical  law  in 
addition  to  the  Old  and  New  Testaments.  How  far  back  its  pre- 
cepts really  go,  no  one  can  tell ;  but  those  who  taught  it  believed 
that  it  extended  back  to  Moses,  and  had  existed  parallel  with  the 
written  law  from  the  time  of  its  deliverance,^  being  passed  along  by 

^  As  a  good  example  of  rabbinical  interpretation  on  which  such  conclusions  rest, 
a  rabbi  of  the  third  century  a.d.  takes  Exodus  24  '^  ;  "I  will  give  thee  tables  of  stone, 
and  the  Law,  and  the  Commandment,  which  I  have  written,  that  thou  mayest  teach 

114 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE  ;  JOSEPHUS  ii5 

word  of  mouth  from  generation  to  generation.  The  Talmud,  in 
which  this  ''oral  law"  was  embodied,  is  to  the  Jews  like  the  New 
Testament  to  Christians,  something  far  more  than  a  mere  commen- 
tary on  the  Scriptures,  of  an  authority  and  influence  parallel  to  them. 
It  is  made  up  of  two  parts,  the  Mishnah,  which  is  a  collection  of  texts, 
begun  under  the  Maccabees  and  compiled  at  the  end  of  the  second 
century  a.d.,  and  the  Gemara,  or  comments  on  the  Mishnah.  The 
discussions  of  the  Palestinian  rabbis  were  codified  in  the  fourth 
century  a.d.  in  what  is  called  the  Jerusalem  Talmud.  Those  of 
the  schools  of  Babylonia  were  codified  in  the  fifth  and  sixth  cen- 
turies A.D.  The  latter,  which  is  about  four  times  the  size  of  the 
Jerusalem  Talmud,  is  what  is  meant  when  "  The  Talmud"  is  referred 
to  without  further  qualification. 

This  mass  of  material,  as  an  ostensible  body  of  recorded  tradi- 
tion, might  seem  to  have  some  claim  upon  our  attention ;  but  we 
have  included  it  in  this  survey  mainly  to  emphasize  its  essentially 
unhistorical  character,  and  the  fact  that  Talmudic  training  tends 
to  block  the  path  of  historical  criticism.  In  the  first  place,  in  spite 
of  all  the  vast  literature  on  the  Talmud,  —  and  no  text  has  ever 
been  studied  with  more  intensive  zeal,  —  it  has  not  received  that 
"higher  criticism"  which  has  led  us  at  last  to  appreciate  the  his- 
toricity of  the  biblical  narratives.  Owing  largely  to  the  very 
fact  that  it  was  so  long  oral  tradition,  it  is  difficult,  perhaps  impos- 
sible, to  determine  the  origin  and  first  setting  of  the  central  texts. 
In  any  case  this  work  has  not  yet  been  done,  and  the  Talmud  re- 
mains a  practically  sealed  book  to  historians,  who  can  use  its  wealth 
of  descriptive  and  illustrative  material  —  the  Talmudists  claim 
that  its  texts  can  meet  every  possible  exigency  in  life  —  only  in 
the  most  general  way.  Talmudic  scholarship  therefore  tends  to 
turn  the  mind  toward  that  type  of  speculation  on  words  and 
phrases  which  results  in  either  the  hair-sphtting  of  quibbles  in  the 
application  of  theological  law  or  the  more  philosophical  moralizing 
that  draws  strength  from  allegory ;  but  neither  of  these  tendencies 

them,"  and  elucidates  the  text  as  follows:  '"Tables/  these  are  the  ten  words  (the 
Decalogue) ;  the  'Law'  is  the  Scripture;  'and  the  commandment,'  that  is  the  Mish- 
nah; 'which  I  have  written,'  these  are  the  Prophets  and  the  Writings  (the  Hagi- 
ographa) ;  'to  teach  tnem,"  that  is  the  Gemara  —  thus  instructing  us  all  that  these  were 
given  to  Moses  from  Sinai."  Quoted  in  article  Talmtid  in  Encyclopedia  Britannica. 
Historical  criticism  cannot  flourish  in  such  an  atmosphere. 


ii6    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

leads  to  historical  analysis.  When  one  examines  the  Talmud,  and 
considers  the  influences  which  it  reflects  from  the  dim  antiquities 
of  Jewish  life,  one  wonders  all  the  more  at  the  historical  product 
of  the  Old  Testament. 

This  impression  is  still  further  strengthened  by  a  glance  at  the 
prophetic  literature,  which  rivalled  the  influence  of  the  Law  upon 
the  Jewish  mind.  We  have  seen  above  how  this  —  along  with  the 
Law  —  became  the  vehicle  for  so  much  of  that  high  moral  teaching 
which  gave  the  lasting  value  to  Jewish  aspirations,  —  aspirations 
which  otherwise  would  hardly  interest  succeeding  ages.^  There 
was  much  of  this  literature,  and  more  still  that  did  not  reach  the 
dignity  of  Hterature,  in  the  later  period  of  Jewish  history .^  It  was 
a  great  contribution,  poetry  fired  by  passion  and  rich  in  dreams, 
the  outpouring  of  Oriental  zealots,  —  the  literature  of  apocalypses. 
But  it  gained  its  best  triumphs  by  its  boldest  defiance  of  fact.  True, 
its  vision  had  power  at  times  to  supplant  the  mean  realities  of  actual 
things  by  new  creations,  made  real  through  that  conviction  which 
impels  to  deeds ;  but  the  historic  forces  which  it  wielded  were  drawn 
more  from  faith  in  the  future  than  from  interest  in  the  past.  Proph- 
etism,  as  we  have  pointed  out  elsewhere,  blocks  the  path  of  scientific 
inquiry ;  and  yet  as  we  register  its  impediment  to  history,  we  cannot 
but  find  in  it  an  expression  —  one  of  several,  but  not  the  least  signifi- 
cant —  of  that  fundamental  difference  in  outlook  between  the  Orien- 
tal and  the  Western  mind.  The  Oriental  has  remained  essentially 
unhistorical  because  of  his  relative  indifference  as  to  fact  and  fancy. 
His  interest  is  determined  more  by  what  he  wishes  things  to  be 
and  less  by  what  they  are.  In  the  West,  in  spite  of  much  persistence 
of  the  same  attitude,  we  have  grown  interested  in  things  as  they  actu- 
ally are,  and  in  things  as  they  actually  were.  History  cannot  substi- 
tute what  one  wishes  to  happen  or  to  have  happened  for  what  actually 
happened.  Its  field  is  not  free  and  open  but  sadly  circumscribed, 
marked  out  by  frustration  and  darkened  by  the  dull  walls  of  fact.' 

*  This  recognition  of  the  lasting  message  of  Jewish  Theology  is  the  theme  of  many 
a  recent  study,  since  the  critics  have  destroyed  the  older  basis  of  canonical  authority. 
As  an  example  may  be  cited  W.  F.  BadS,  The  Old  Testament  in  the  Light  of  Today. 

2  The  chief  name  among  modern  scholars  in  this  field  is  that  of  R.  H.  Charles. 
His  contributions  need  hardly  be  cited  here,  however ;  and  the  student  is  referred  to 
articles  on  Apocrypha,  etc.,  in  Bible  dictionaries  and  encyclopaedias. 

3  This  inability  to  distinguish  between  what  things  are  and  what  one  wishes  them 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;    JOSEPHUS         117 

"The  Law  and  the  Prophets"  are  both  distinctly  Jewish  prod- 
ucts, for,  whatever  they  borrowed  from  beyond  Jordan,  in  both  cases 
they  are  the  expression  of  Palestinian  civilization.  In  the  last 
phase  of  its  history,  however,  Judaism,  especially  in  the  Diaspora 
or  Dispersion  throughout  the  Greco-Roman  world,  came  to  a  certain 
degree  under  the  influences  of  that  Hellenic  civilization  which  had 
permeated  so  much  of  the  Near  East  after  the  conquests  of  Alex- 
ander. The  result  was  that  the  Jew  and  Gentile  were  led  to  look 
into  each  other's  past.  The  mutual  challenge  was  hopeful  for 
history.  It  was  such  a  situation  which,  as  we  shall  see,  had  opened 
the  doors  to  Greek  historical  criticism  in  the  days  of  Herodotus, 
when  the  antiquity  of  Egypt  became  the  touchstone  for  judging 
that  of  Hellas.  One  might  have  thought  that  when  the  two  peoples 
who  really  could  show  some  achievement  in  antique  history-writing 
—  the  Greeks  and  the  Hebrews  —  came  to  know  each  other,  the 
effect  would  be  to  stimulate  a  critical  appreciation  of  that  achieve- 
ment and  so  further  the  cause  of  scientific  history ;  that,  at  least, 
if  the  Hebrews  did  not  profit  from  the  contact,  the  Greeks  would. 
How  they  escaped  doing  so,  —  and  by  so  doing  to  anticipate  by 
twenty  centuries  the  biblical  criticism  of  today,  —  is  apparent 
from  a  consideration  of  the  work  of  the  two  outstanding  figures 
of  Hellenic  Judaism,  Philo  the  philosopher  and  Josephus  the 
historian. 

Philo  Judaeus,  as  he  is  commonly  termed,  was  a  product  of 
Alexandria,  a  contemporary  of  Christ.^  He  comes  into  our  survey, 
not  because  of  any  contribution  which  he  offered  to  the  history 
of  History,  but  because  of  his  influence  in  furthering  that  essentially 
unhistorical  habit  of  thought  to  which  we  have  referred  above,  by 
interpreting  texts  by  way  of  allegory.  It  was  a  method  which 
Christian  writers  were  to  develop  to  such  an  extent  that  we  may 
leave  the  fuller  consideration  of  it  until  we  come  to  the  work  of 

to  be  is  a  characteristic  of  all  immature  or  undisciplined  minds.  It  is  a  factor  in  cur- 
rent world-politics,  to  be  borne  in  mind  in  the  entry  of  backward  people  into  the 
society  of  nations.  They  can  readily  use  the  same  language  of  political  institutions 
but  ^le  sense  of  fact  is  not  always  the  same. 

1  We  know  almost  nothing  of  his  life,  beyond  an  incident  or  two.  He  was  born 
about  the  second  decade  before  Christ  and  was  in  Rome  in  40  a.d.  on  a  mission  for 
the  Alexandrian  Jews.  His  works,  however,  have  been  preserved  in  surprisingly  full 
form.     See  article  Philo  in  Encychpctdia  Brilannka. 


ii8    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

Origen  and  the  "apologists."  But,  although  Philo  seems  to  have 
had  little  direct  influence  upon  later  Christian  writers  ^  —  probably 
because  he  was  a  Jew,  —  the  contribution  which  he  offered  to  the 
world  of  his  time,  Jew  and  Greek,  was  so  distinctive  as  to  demand 
attention.  For  Philo  applied  the  familiar  device  of  allegory  not 
simply  to  explain  the  texts  but  to  explain  them  away,  by  boldly 
taking  them  over  from  history  to  philosophy. 

One  or  two  examples,  out  of  an  almost  unlimited  number,  will 
suffice  to  show  how  the  commentary  on  the  Pentateuch  runs,  as  it 
takes  up  the  text  verse  by  verse.  The  Allegories  of  the  Sacred 
Laws  begins  as  follows : 

'"And  the  heaven  and  the  earth  and  all  their  world  was  completed.' ^ 
Having  previously  related  the  creation  of  the  mind  and  of  sense,  Moses  now 
proceeds  to  describe  the  perfection  which  was  brought  about  by  them  both. 
And  he  says  that  neither  the  indivisible  mind  nor  the  particular  sensations 
received  perfection,  but  only  ideas,  one  the  idea  of  the  mind,  the  other  of  sen- 
sation. And,  speaking  symbolically,  he  calls  the  mind  heaven,  since  the  na- 
tures which  can  only  be  comprehended  by  the  intellect  are  in  heaven.  And 
sensation  he  calls  earth,  because  it  is  sensation  which  has  obtained  a  corporeal 
and  somewhat  earthy  constitution.  The  ornaments  of  the  mind  are  called  the 
incorporeal  things,  which  are  perceptible  only  by  the  intellect.  Those  of  sen- 
sation are  the  corporeal  things,  and  everything  in  short  which  is  perceptible 
by  the  external  senses. 

"'And  on  the  sixth  day  God  finished  his  work  which  he  had  made.'  It 
would  be  a  sign  of  great  simplicity  to  thinli  that  the  world  was  created  in  six 
days  or  indeed  at  all  in  time;  because  all  time  is  only  the  space  of  days  and 
nights,  and  these  things  the  motion  of  the  sun  as  he  passes  over  the  earth  and 
under  the  earth  does  necessarily  make.  But  the  sun  is  a  portion  of  heaven, 
so  that  one  must  confess  that  time  is  a  thing  posterior  to  the  world.  There- 
fore it  would  be  correctly  said  that  the  world  was  not  created  in  time,  but  that 
time  had  its  existence  in  consequence  of  the  world.  For  it  is  the  motion  of  the 
heaven  that  has  displayed  the  nature  of  time. 

"  When,  therefore,  Moses  says,  '  God  completed  his  works  on  the  sixth 
day,'  we  must  understand  that  he  is  speaking  not  of  a  number  of  days,  but  that 
he  takes  six  as  a  perfect  number.  Since  it  is  the  first  number  which  is  equal 
in  its  parts,  in  the  half,  and  the  third  and  sixth  parts,  and  since  it  is  produced 
by  the  multiplication  of  two  unequal  factors,  two  and  three.  And  the  numbers 
two  and  three  exceed  the  incorporeality  which  exists  in  the  unit ;  because  the 

'  There  are  almost  no  manusicripts  of  his  works  in  mediaeval  ecclesiastical  libraries. 
Cf.M.  R.  James,  The  Biblical  Antiquities  of  Philo  (1917),  Introduction.  This  is  a 
pseudo-Philo  summary  of  the  Pentateuch  of  the  end  of  the  first  century  a.d. 

^  Genesis  2  *. 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;    JOSEPHUS  119 

number  two  is  an  image  of  matter  being  divided  into  two  parts  and  dissected 
like  matter.  And  the  number  three  is  an  image  of  a  solid  body,  because  a 
solid  can  be  divided  according  to  a  threefold  division.  Not  but  what  it  is  also 
akin  to  the  motions  of  organic  animals.  For  an  organic  body  is  naturally 
capable  of  motion  in  six  directions,  forward,  backwards,  upwards,  downwards, 
to  the  right,  and  to  the  left.  And  at  all  events  he  desires  to  show  that  the 
races  of  mortal,  and  also  of  all  the  immortal  beings,  exist  according  to  their 
appropriate  numbers  ;  measuring  mortal  beings,  as  I  have  said,  by  the  number 
six,  and  the  blessed  and  immortal  beings  by  the  number  seven.  First,  there- 
fore, having  desisted  from  the  creation  of  mortal  creatures  on  the  seventh 
day,  he  began  the  formation  of  other  and  more  divine  beings."  ^ 

When  one  considers  that  such  speculations  are  the  matured 
contribution  of  one  of  the  greatest  thinkers  of  antiquity,  one  sees 
how  far  adrift  theology  might  go  from  the  sober  world  of  fact  and 
the  processes  of  history.  And  theology  was  to  capture  the  in- 
tellectual interests  of  the  age. 

Sometimes  Philo  recognizes  the  statement  of  fact  in  the  narra- 
tive but  even  that  is  the  material  veil  for  some  divine  truth.  For 
instance,  the  rivers  of  the  Garden  of  Eden  may  be  real  rivers,  — 
though  the  inadequacy  of  the  geography  of  Genesis  is  troublesome, 
—  but  the  escape  is  always  at  hand,  for  the  four  rivers  are  the  signs 
of  the  four  virtues,  Prudence,  Temperance,  Courage  and  Justice, 
flowing  from  the  central  stream  of  the  Divine  Wisdom.^  Reading 
such  a  passage  one  recalls  the  jeers  of  Herodotus  at  the  geographers 
who  held  to  the  Homeric  cosmography  and  especially  the  Ocean 
Stream  encircling  the  world ;  ^  but  by  no  flight  of  imagination  can 
one  think  of  Herodotus  solving  his  difficulties  by  transmuting 
rivers  into  ideas.  The  divergence  between  the  paths  of  history 
and  philosophy  is  fortunately  thus  sufficiently  clear  at  the  start 
that  we  need  not  stray  longer  from  the  one  before  us. 

Flavius  Josephus  stands  out  as  the  very  opposite  of  Philo. 
He  was  a  man-of -affairs,  warrior,  statesman  and  diplomatist. 
He  was  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  great  Jewish  revolt,  but  made  his 
peace  with  Vespasian  and  became  a  favorite  of  the  Flavian  imperial 
family,  from  whom  he  took  his  adopted  name.     After  the  destruction 

1  Philo  Judseus,  The  Allegories  of  the  Sacred  Lan'S,  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  I-II.  (Translated 
by  C.  D.  Yonge  in  Bohn's  Ecclesiastical  Library.) 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XIX.     C/.  also  Questions  and  Solutions,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XII. 

3  Vide  infra,  Chap.  XIII. 


120    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

of  Jerusalem  he  passed  most  of  his  hfe  at  Rome,  and  there  wrote 
in  Greek  ^  for  the  Greco-Roman  world,  a  history  of  The  Wars  of  the 
Jews,  and  a  long  account  of  The  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  as  well  as 
a  defence  of  Jewish  historical  sources  and  methods  against  the 
attacks  of  Greeks,  especially  one  Apion,  in  a  treatise  Against  Apion!^ 
In  addition  he  wrote  his  own  biography,  as  a  reply  to  attacks  upon 
him  by  his  own  people.  Thus  the  man  whom  the  Jews  most  hated 
as  a  betrayer  of  his  country  in  his  own  day  became  the  defender 
of  its  past.  But  he  has  never  been  popular  among  the  Jews.  His 
readers  were  mainly  among  the  heathen  and  the  Christian.  Among 
them  his  vogue  was  surprisingly  large,  considering  his  theme.  His 
works  have  survived  as  few  from  that  age  have,  almost  as  though 
he  had  been  a  Christian  Father. 

Josephus'  own  life  enters  so  much  into  his  writings  that  it  tends 
to  distract  one  from  considering  them  on  their  own  merits.  He 
was  born  37-38  a.d.  of  high-priestly  stock,  and  studied  for  the 
priesthood.  He  was  a  prominent  young  Pharisee  when  sent  to 
Rome  on  a  successful  mission  to  plead  for  some  Jews  in  the  year 
63-64.  Then  he  was  drawn  into  the  Great  Rebellion,  becoming  one 
of  the  leaders,  but  turned  to  the  Roman  side  after  his  capture, 
saving  his  life  indeed  by  prophesying  that  Vespasian  would  be 
emperor.  The  favor  of  the  Flavians  never  failed  him  after  that, 
in  spite  of  constant  attacks  upon  him  by  the  Jews.  This  shifty  — 
and  thrifty  —  career  is  reflected  in  the  first  of  his  works,  the  history 
of  the  Jewish  War,  which  was  written  between  69  and  79  a.d.,  at 
once  a  court  history  and  an  apology. 

The  Wars  of  the  Jews  is  an  elaborate  work  in  seven  books,  of 
which  the  first  two  trace  the  history  of  the  Jews  from  the  capture 
of  Jerusalem  by  Antiochus  Epiphanes  to  the  war  of  67  a.d.  In 
this  portion  he  relies  on  some  previous  historians,  such  as  Nicholas 
of  Damascus,^  and  does  not  venture  far  afield.  The  remaining 
books  are  based  on  contemporary  sources  and  personal  knowledge, 

1  His  early  Aramaic  account  of  The  Wars  of  the  Jews  is  lost.  He  tells  us  in  the 
introduction  that  he  translated  it  into  Greek  (Sect,  i),  but  the  relation  of  this  Ara- 
maic version  to  the  text  we  have  is  not  known. 

2  Apion  was  the  leader  of  an  Alexandrian  mission  opposing  Philo.  In  this  in- 
cident, therefore,  we  have  a  link  between  the  philosopher  and  the  historian. 

3  Nicholas  of  Damascus  was  a  Greek  savant  who  became  friend  and  adviser  to 
Herod  the  Great  and  who  played  a  considerable  part  in  the  diplomacy  and  politics 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;    JOSEPHUS        121 

and  should  be  read  along  with  his  Life.  He  states  that  he  sub- 
mitted the  history  to  Titus,  who  indorsed  it,  as  well  he  might, 
for  Josephus  absolves  him  from  blame  for  firing  the  Temple,^  al- 
though Tacitus  indicates  that  he  gave  definite  orders  to  do  so ;  and 
in  general  charges  the  Zealots,  who  were  the  misguided  Jewish 
patriots,  with  the  real  responsibihty  for  the  disaster  to  their  nation. 
Providence  is  visibly  on  the  side  of  the  great  battalions. 

The  Antiquities  of  the  Jews  is  a  much  more  ambitious  work,^ 
one  of  the  longest  individual  products  in  antique  literature.  In 
twenty  long  books,  Josephus  traces,  for  those  who  are  unfamiliar 
with  the  Bible,  —  and  the  ignorance  of  the  classical  world  about 
the  Jews  was  very  great,^  —  the  story  of  the  Jewish  past.  His  chief 
source  was  the  Septuagint,  the  Greek  edition  of  the  Old  Testament,^ 
but  in  addition  he  added  from  that  store  of  tradition  passed  along 
among  those  learned  in  the  law.  He  also  brings  in  profane  testi- 
mony, using  Herodotus,  for  instance,  for  the  story  of  Cyrus,^  and 
many  Roman  sources  for  the  later  part.  He  works  these  over, 
however,  and  fits  them  into  his  story  so  that  it  is  a  work  of  textual 
criticism  —  into  which  we  need  not  enter  —  to  trace  the  actual 
process  of  composition. 

This  brings  us  to  consider  his  style.  Like  Polybius,  he  is  con- 
scious of  his  weakness  in  art ;  but  hopes  to  make  up  for  it  by  the 
content.    He  promises,  in  the  preface  to  the  Wars,  to  conceal  noth- 

of  the  Near  East  under  Augustus.  His  historical  writings  included  a  biography  of 
Augustus  of  which  but  slight  fragments  remain,  and  a  Universal  History  in  one 
hundred  forty-two  books,  dealing  with  the  Assyrians,  Lydians,  Greeks,  Medes  and 
Persians,  and  concentrating  upon  the  history  of  Herod  and  his  own  time.  Josephus 
used  this  latter  part  in  detail,  while  criticising  Nicholas  for  his  highly  flattering  and 
unreliable  account  of  his  patron's  reign.  The  fragments  of  the  Universal  History  are 
preserved  in  C.  Miiller,  Fragmenta  Historicorum  Gracortim  (5  vols.,  1841-1873),  Vol. 
in,  pp.  343-464 ;  Vol.  IV,  pp.  661-668,  and  in  L.  Dindorf,  Historici  Graci  Minores 
(2  vols.,  1870-1871),  Vol.  I,  pp.  1-153.  Cf.  E.  Schiirer,  Gcschichtc  des  jiidischcn 
Volkes  imZcitaltcr  Jesu  Christi  (3  vols,  and  index,  3d  and  4th  ed.,  1901-1911),  Vol.  I, 

PP-  50-57- 

1  Cf.  Josephus,  The  Wars  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  VI,  Sect.  2  (in  The  Works  of 
Flavins  Josephus,  trans,  by  W.  Whiston).  Cf.  Sulpicus  Severus,  Chronica,  Bk.  II,  Chap. 
XXX ;  Orosius,  Hisloriarmn  Advcrsum  Paganos  Libri  Septcm,  Bk.  VII,  Chap.  IX. 

2  Note  the  opening  words  of  the  first  chapter. 

'  Vide  T.  Reinach,  Textes  d'auteurs  grecs  et  rortiains  rclatifs  au  jiidaisme  (1895). 
*  It  is  doubtful  if  he  knew  Hebrew.     Cf.  B.  Niese's  article  Josephus  in  Encyclopadia 
of  Religion  and  Ethics  (edited  by  J.  Hastings,  1908-1919),  Vol.  VII. 
^  Cf.  Josephus,  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  XI,  Chap.  II. 


122     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

ing  nor  add  "  anything  to  the  known  truth  of  things."  ^  "I  have 
written  it  down,"  he  says,  "for  .  .  .  those  that  love  truth,  but  not 
for  those  who  please  themselves  (with  fictitious  relations) ."  -  "How 
good  the  style  is  must  be  left  to  the  determination  of  the  readers ; 
but  as  for  the  agreement  with  the  facts,  I  shall  not  scruple  to  say, 
and  that  boldly,  that  truth  hath  been  what  I  have  alone  aimed 
at  throughout  its  entire  composition."  ^  In  the  face  of  such  prot- 
estations one  is  reluctantly  obliged  to  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
Josephus  was  as  disingenuous  about  his  style  as  about  the  sub- 
stance, —  which,  we  have  just  seen,  was  badly  twisted  for  his  own 
defence.  For  he  was  a  florid  writer,  trying  out  successfully  all  the 
devices  of  the  literary  art  of  his  day  with  which  he  was  familiar. 
He  invents  speeches  for  the  biblical  heroes,  as  for  those  of  later 
days  ;  ^  he  strives  for  effect  by  exaggeration,  using  figures,  as  some 
one  has  said  of  a  statesman  of  our  own  time,  like  adjectives :  the 
Jews  killed  at  Jerusalem  number  1,100,000,^  whereas  Tacitus  puts 
the  total  number  of  the  besieged  at  the  outside  figure  of  600,000.^ 
He  elaborates  on  the  statesmanship  of  Moses,^  until  one  feels  that 
it  is  just  a  little  overdone.  Yet  those  of  his  own  day  liked  it,  and 
that  is  its  justification ;  so  that  even  the  little  self -apologetic 
touches,  concerning  his  sad  awkwardness  in  Greek,  may  have  added 
to  the  total  effect,  —  especially  as  he  deftly  combines  this  with  an 
appeal  to  take  him  at  his  word  in  the  subject-matter.  Take  for 
instance  these  closing  words  of  his  great  Antiquities: 

"  And  I  am  so  bold  as  to  say,  now  I  have  so  completely  perfected  the  work  I 
proposed  to  myself  to  do,  that  no  other  person,  whether  he  were  a  Jew  or  a 
foreigner,  had  he  ever  so  great  an  inchnation  to  it,  could  so  accurately  deliver 
these  accounts  to  the  Greeks  as  is  done  in  these  books.  For  those  of  my  own 
nation  freely  acknowledge,  that  I  far  exceed  them  in  the  learning  belonging 
to  Jews;  I  have  also  taken  a  great  deal  of  pains  to  obtain  the  learning  of  the 
Greeks,  and  understand  the  elements  of  the  Greek  language,  although  I  have 
so  long  accustomed  myself  to  speak  our  own  tongue,  that  I  cannot  pronounce 

^  Josephus,  The  Wars  of  the  Jews,  Preface,  Sect.  10. 
2  Ibid.,  Sect.  12. 

Ubid.,  Bk.  VII,  Chap.  XI,  Sect.  5. 

*  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XIX,  Sect.  4;  Josephus,  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  II, 
Joseph's  speeches,  etc. 

^  Josephus,  The  Wars  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  IX,  Sect.  3, 

^  Tacitus,  Historiae,  Bk.  V,  Chap.  XIII. 

^  Josephus,  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  Bks.  II,  III,  IV. 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;   JOSEPHUS  123 

Greek  with  sufficient  exactness ;  for  our  nation  does  not  encourage  those  that 
learn  the  languages  of  many  nations,  and  so  adorn  their  discourses  with  the 
smoothness  of  their  periods ;  because  they  look  upon  this  sort  of  accompUsh- 
ment  as  common,  not  only  to  all  sorts  of  freemen,  but  to  as  many  of  the  servants 
as  please  to  learn  them.  But  they  give  him  the  testimony  of  being  a  wise  man, 
who  is  fully  acquainted  with  our  laws,  and  is  able  to  interpret  their  meaning; 
on  which  account,  as  there  have  been  many  who  have  done  their  endeavors 
with  great  patience  to  obtain  this  learning,  there  have  yet  hardly  been  so  many 
as  two  or  three  that  have  succeeded  therein,  who  were  immediately  well  re- 
warded for  their  pains." ^ 

Josephus  was  relatively  free  from  the  impediments  that  blocked 
the  path  of  more  rehgious  natures  to  the  consideration  of  mere 
matters-of-fact.  But  there  is  a  touch  of  the  difficulty  in  his  com- 
ment on  Daniel  which  is  worth  a  passing  attention.  He  says  that 
Daniel  "  not  only  prophesied  of  future  events,  as  did  the  other 
prophets,  but  also  determined  the  time  of  their  accomplishment."  ^ 
The  problem  was  here  presented  of  working  out  the  numbered 
years  of  the  divine  plan,  which  was  to  absorb  so  much  of  the  specu- 
lation of  later  ages  and  which  projected  chronology  into  the  future 
instead  of  establishing  it  in  the  past.  Had  Josephus  been  a  thinker 
rather  than  a  student,  he  would  have  followed  the  lead  here  given, 
into  unhistorical  grounds.  Fortunately,  he  was  a  historian  in- 
stead of  a  philosopher. 

There  remains  one  work  to  consider,  and  that  the  most  interest- 
ing of  all  to  the  historian  of  History,  the  treatise  Against  Apion, 
written  to  challenge  the  gentile  historians  for  their  failure  to  ap- 
preciate the  history  of  the  Jews,  and  to  justify  its  authenticity.  It 
is  anticipating  here  to  quote  the  criticism  of  Greek  historiography 
with  which  the  treatise  opens,  and  yet  as  it  contains  so  much  that 
is  still  suggestive  and  sound,  it  may  serve  as  a  connecting  link  with 
the  next  part  of  our  story ,^  and  as  a  discriminating  survey  of  antique 
historiography,  in  general,  it  justifies  quotation  at  length :  ^ 

^Josephus,  Antiquities  of  the  Jews,  Bk.  XX,  Chap.  XI,  Sect.  2.  (Whiston's 
translation.) 

"^Ibid.,  Bk.  X,  Chap.  XI,  Sect.  7. 

^  This  is  a  disadvantage  due  to  the  treatment  of  the  different  national  histories  as 
entities  rather  than  in  a  comparative,  chronological  survey.  But  after  all  the  ante- 
cedents of  the  Greco-Roman  writers  were  national. 

^Josephus,  Against  Apion,  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  II-VI.  (Whiston's  translation,  revised 
by  A.  R.  Shilleto  in  Bohn's  Standard  Library.) 


124    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

"I  cannot  but  greatly  wonder  at  tjiose  who  think  that  we  must  attend  to 
none  but  Greeks  as  to  the  most  ancient  facts,  and  learn  the  truth  from  them 
only,  and  that  we  are  not  to  beUeve  ourselves  or  other  men.  For  I  am  convinced 
that  the  very  reverse  is  the  case,  if  we  will  not  follow  vain  opinions,  but  extract 
the  truth  from  the  facts  themselves.  For  you  will  find  that  almost  all  which 
concerns  the  Greeks  happened  not  long  ago,  nay,  one  may  say,  is  of  yesterday 
and  the  day  before  only ;  I  speak  of  the  building  of  their  cities,  the  inventions 
of  their  arts,  and  the  recording  of  their  laws ;  and  as  for  their  care  about  com- 
piling histories,  it  is  very  nearly  the  last  thing  they  set  about.  Indeed  they 
admit  themselves  that  it  is  the  Egyptians,  the  Cbaldaeans  and  the  Phoenicians 
(for  I  wiU  not  now  include  ourselves  among  those)  that  have  preserved  the 
memory  of  the  most  ancient  and  lasting  tradition.  For  all  these  nations  in- 
habit such  countries  as  are  least  subject  to  destruction  from  the  climate  and 
atmosphere,  and  they  have  also  taken  especial  care  to  have  nothing  forgotten 
of  what  was  done  among  them,  but  their  history  was  esteemed  sacred,  and  ever 
written  in  the  public  records  by  men  of  the  greatest  wisdom.  Whereas  ten 
thousand  destructions  have  aSiicted  the  country  which  the  Greeks  inhabit, 
and  blotted  out  the  memory  of  former  actions ;  so  that,  ever  beginning  a  new 
way  of  Uving,  they  supposed  each  of  them  that  their  mode  of  life  originated 
with  themselves.  It  was  also  late,  and  with  difiiculty,  that  they  came  to  know 
the  use  of  letters.  For  those  who  would  trace  their  knowledge  of  letters  to  the 
greatest  antiquity,  boast  that  they  learned  them  from  the  Phoenicians  and  from 
Cadmus.  But  nobody  is  able  to  produce  any  writing  preserved  from  that 
time,  either  in  the  temples  or  in  any  other  public  monuments ;  and  indeed  the 
time  when  those  lived  who  went  to  the  Trojan  war  so  many  years  afterwards 
is  in  great  doubt,  and  it  is  a  question  whether  the  Greeks  used  letters  at  that 
time;  and  the  most  prevailing  opinion,  and  that  nearest  the  truth,  is,  that 
they  were  ignorant  of  the  present  way  of  using  letters.  Certainly  there  is 
not  any  writing  among  them,  which  the  Greeks  agree  to  be  genuine,  ancienter 
than  Homer's  poems.  And  he  plainly  was  later  than  the  siege  of  Troy :  and 
they  say  that  even  he  did  not  leave  his  poems  in  writing,  but  that  their  memory 
was  preserved  in  songs,  and  that  they  were  afterwards  collected  together,  and 
that  that  is  the  reason  why  such  a  number  of  variations  are  found  in  them. 
As  for  those  who  set  about  writing  histories  among  them,  such  I  mean  as  Cadmus 
of  Miletus,  and  Acusilaus  of  Argos,  and  any  others  that  may  be  mentioned  after 
him,  they  lived  but  a  short  time  before  the  Persian  expedition  into  Greece. 
Moreover,  as  to  those  who  first  philosophized  as  to  things  celestial  and  divine 
among  the  Greeks,  as  Pherecydes  the  Syrian,  and  Pythagoras,  and  Thales,  all 
with  one  consent  agree,  that  they  learned  what  they  knew  from  the  Egyptians 
and  Chaldaeans,  and  wrote  but  little.  And  these  are  the  things  which  are  sup- 
posed to  be  the  oldest  of  all  among  the  Greeks,  and  they  have  much  ado  to 
believe  that  the  writings  ascribed  to  those  men  are  genuine.^ 

"  How  can  it  then  be  other  than  an  absurd  thing  for  the  Greeks  to  be  so 

1  CJ.  Josephus,  The  Wars  of  the  Jews,  Preface,  Sect.  5. 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;   JOSEPHUS  125 

proud,  as  if  they  were  the  only  people  acquainted  with  antiquity,  the  only 
people  that  have  handed  down  the  truth  about  those  early  times  in  an  accurate 
manner?  Nay,  who  is  there  that  cannot  easily  gather  from  the  Greek  writers 
themselves,  that  they  knew  but  Uttle  on  good  foundation  when  they  set  about 
writing,  but  rather  jotted  down  their  own  conjectures  as  to  facts?  Accord- 
ingly they  frequently  confute  one  another  in  their  own  books,  and  do  not  hesi- 
tate to  give  us  the  most  contradictory  accounts  of  the  same  things.  But  I 
should  spend  my  time  to  little  purpose,  if  I  should  teach  the  Greeks  what  they 
know  better  than  I  already,  what  great  discrepancy  there  is  between  Hellanicus 
and  AcusUaus  as  to  their  genealogies,  in  how  many  cases  AcusUaus  corrects 
Hesiod,  or  how  Ephorus  demonstrates  Hellanicus  to  have  told  lies  in  most  of 
his  history ;  or  how  Timaeus  in  like  manner  contradicts  Ephorus,  and  the  suc- 
ceeding writers  Timaeus,  and  all  writers  Herodotus.  Nor  could  Timaeus  agree 
with  Antiochus  and  PhUistus  and  Callias  about  SiciUan  history,  any  more  than 
do  the  several  writers  of  the  Atthidae  foUow  one  another  as  to  Athenian  affairs, 
nor  do  the  historians  that  wrote  on  ArgoUc  history  coincide  about  the  affairs 
of  the  Argives.  And  now  what  need  I  say  any  more  about  particular  cities 
and  smaller  places,  when  in  the  most  approved  writers  of  the  expedition  of 
the  Persians,  and  of  the  actions  done  in  it,  there  are  such  great  differences? 
Nay,  Thucydides  himself  is  accused  by  some  as  often  writing  what  is  false, 
although  he  seems  to  have  given  us  the  most  accurate  history  of  the  affairs 
of  his  own  times. 

"As  for  the  causes  of  such  great  discrepancy,  many  others  may  perhaps 
appear  probable  to  those  who  wish  to  investigate  the  matter,  but  I  attach  the 
greatest  importance  to  two  which  I  shall  mention.  And  first  I  shall  mention 
what  seems  to  me  the  principal  cause,  namely,  the  fact  that  from  the  beginning 
the  Greeks  were  careless  about  pubhc  records  of  what  was  done  on  each  occa- 
sion, and  this  would  natvirally  pave  the  way  for  error,  and  give  those  that  wished 
to  write  on  old  subjects  opportunity  for  lying.  For  not  only  were  records  neg- 
lected by  the  other  Greeks,  but  even  among  the  Athenians  themselves  also, 
who  pretend  to  be  Autochthons,  and  to  have  applied  themselves  to  learning, 
there  are  no  such  records  extant,  but  they  say  the  laws  of  Draco  concerning 
murders,  which  are  now  extant  in  writing,  are  the  most  ancient  of  their  public 
records,  yet  Draco  lived  only  a  little  before  the  tyrant  Pisistratus.  For  as  to 
the  Arcadians,  who  make  such  boasts  of  their  antiquity,  why  need  I  mention 
them,  since  it  was  still  later  before  they  learned  their  letters,  and  that  with 
difficulty  also? 

"There  must,  therefore,  natiirally  arise  great  differences  among  WTiters, 
when  no  records  existed,  which  might  at  once  inform  those  who  desired  to 
learn,  and  refute  those  that  would  tell  lies.  However,  we  must  assign  a  second 
cause,  besides  the  former  one,  for  these  discrepancies.  Those  who  were  the 
most  zealous  to  write  history  were  not  solicitous  for  the  discovery  of  truth, 
although  it  is  very  easy  always  to  make  such  a  profession,  but  they  tried  to  dis- 
play their  fine  powers  of  writing,  and  in  whatever  manner  of  writing  they 
thought  they  were  able  to  exceed  others,  to  that  did  they  apply  themselves. 


126    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Some  betook  themselves  to  the  writing  of  fabulous  narrations ;  some  endea- 
voured to  please  cities  or  kings  by  writing  in  their  commendation;  others  fell 
to  finding  faults  with  transactions,  or  with  the  writers  of  such  transactions, 
and  thought  to  make  a  great  figure  by  so  doing.  However,  such  do  what  is 
of  all  things  the  most  contrary  to  true  history.  For  it  is  the  characteristic  of 
true  history,  that  aU  both  speak  and  write  the  same  about  the  same  things, 
whereas,  these  men,  by  writing  differently  about  the  same  things,  thought 
they  would  be  supposed  to  write  with  the  greatest  regard  to  truth.  We  must 
indeed  yield  to  the  Greek  writers  as  to  language  and  style  of  composition,  but 
not  as  regards  the  truth  of  ancient  history,  and  least  of  all  as  to  the  national 
customs  of  various  countries. 

"  As  to  the  care  of  writing  down  the  records  from  the  earliest  antiquity, 
that  the  priests  were  intrusted  with  that  function,  and  philosophized  about  it, 
among  the  Egyptians  and  Babylonians,  and  the  Chaldeans  also  among  the 
Babylonians,  and  that  the  Phoenicians,  who  especially  mixed  with  the  Greeks, 
made  use  of  letters  both  for  the  common  affairs  of  life,  and  for  handing  down 
the  history  of  pubhc  transactions,  I  think  I  may  omit  any  proof  of  this,  because 
all  men  allow  it  to  be  so.  But  I  shall  endeavour  briefly  to  show  that  our  fore- 
fathers took  the  same  care  about  writing  their  records  (for  I  will  not  say  they 
took  greater  care  than  the  others  I  spoke  of)  and  that  they  committed  that 
office  to  their  high  priests  and  prophets,  and  that  these  records  have  been  writ- 
ten all  along  down  to  our  own  times  with  the  utmost  accuracy,  and  that,  if  it 
be  not  too  bold  for  me  to  say  so,  our  history  will  be  so  written  hereafter." 

Josephus  then  goes  on  to  argue  the  superiority  of  a  people  who 
have  "not  ten  thousand  books  disagreeing  with  and  contradicting 
one  another,  but  only  twenty-two  books,  which  contain  the  records 
of  all  time  and  are  justly  believed  to  be  divine."  ^  We  cannot 
follow  him  further  in  the  argument,  but  must  recall  the  value  of 
the  succeeding  chapters  for  more  than  Hebrew  historiography, 
since  embedded  in  them  are  the  selections  from  gentile  writers, 
especially  Manetho  and  Berossos,  which  are  our  only  source  for 
them.     The  pamphlet  is  the  learned  work  of  a  clever  man. 

The  last,  and  greatest,  of  the  Jewish  historians,  Flavius  Josephus, 
recalls,  strangely  enough,  the  last  and  greatest  of  the  historians 
of  Egypt  and  Baby  Ionia- Assyria,  Manetho  and  Berossos.  Josephus 
too,  as  a  historian,  was  more  a  product  of  the  Greco-Roman  world 
than  of  the  direct  antecedents  of  his  own  national  culture.  All 
three  were  stimulated  to  write  the  history  of  their  countries  by  the 
desire  to  make  it  known  to  the  Gentile.     But  Josephus  goes  beyond 

^Josephus,  Against  Apion,  Bk.  I,  Sect.  8. 


NON-BIBLICAL  LITERATURE;    JOSEPHUS        127 

them  in  achievement,  and  brings  to  mind  still  more  the  last  of 
the  great  Greek  historians,  Polybius,^  whose  life,  indeed,  was  singu- 
larly like  his  own.  Both  wrote  their  histories  at  Rome  as  high 
favorites  of  those  who  had  crushed  out  the  last  movement  of  freedom 
in  their  native  lands ;  and  both  profited  from  being  on  the  defensive 
among  an  alien  people,  whom  they  had  to  impress  by  sound  method 
and  weight  of  evidence.  The  result  was  to  make  of  the  Greek 
and  the  Jew  not  only  historians  but  historical  critics,  and  to  that 
degree  moderns  among  the  ancients.  We  see  again  here  another 
illustration  of  the  point  we  have  touched  upon  before,  that  it  is 
not  so  much  the  long  procession  of  the  centuries  which  produces 
the  historian  as  the  need  to  convince  one's  contemporaries  of  the 
truth  of  what  one  tells.  The  mere  possession  of  a  mighty  past  is 
of  less  value  than  a  critical  audience. 

1  Vide  Chap.  XVI. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Articles  in  the  larger  Encyclopaedias  (especially  the  Jewish  EncyclopCBdia) 
furnish  the  best  introduction  to  a  study  of  the  Talmud.  A  most  useful  manual 
is  H.  L.  Strack's  Einleitung  in  den  Talmud  (4th  ed.,  1908)  with  bibliography. 
There  is  an  English  translation  of  the  Talmud  by  M.  L.  Rodkinson  (20  vols., 
1918)  and  a  comprehensive  German  translation  by  L.  Goldschmidt,  Der  baby- 
lonische  Talmud  (8  vols.,  1897-1917). 

On  this  whole  period  of  Jewish  history,  the  classical  work  is  E.  Schurer's 
Geschichte  des  jiidischen  Volkes  im  Zeitalter  Jesu  Christi  (3  vols,  and  index, 
3d  and  4th  ed.,  1901-1911;  tr.  1897-1898).  The  literature  dealing  with 
Philo  is  summarized  in  the  notable  article,  Philo,  in  the  Encyclopcedia  Bri- 
tannica.  Those  of  his  works  of  interest  to  the  student  of  history  have  been 
translated  by  C.  D.  Yonge,  in  Bohn's  Ecclesiastical  Library. 

The  works  of  Josephus  are  available  in  several  editions.  The  Greek  text 
by  B.  Niese  (7  vols.,  1887-1895)  remains  standard,  and  the  Teubner  edition 
is  based  on  it.  The  full  bibliography  in  Schiirer  is  still  of  value.  The  trans- 
lation by  W.  Whiston,  a  classic  in  itself,  from  the  first  part  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  has  been  reprinted  several  times.  It  has  been  slightly  revised  by 
A.  R.  Shilleto  (1889-1890).  A  Latin  text  of  the  tract  Against  Apion  is 
available,  in  Corpus  Scriptorum  Ecclesiasticorum  Latinorum  (1898),  Vol. 
XXXVII,  edited  by  K.  Boysen. 


SECTION    III 
GREEK   HISTORY 

CHAPTER  XII 

FROM  HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS 

When  we  come  to  Greece  we  at  once  think  of  "Homer,"  and 
recent  discoveries,  which  have  remade  our  perspectives  of  Greek 
history,  but  confirm  the  world-old  impression.  The  archaeologist 
has  unearthed  Troys  before  Troy,  but  he  has  found  no  pre-Homeric 
Homer,  Although  now  the  centuries  stretch  away  beyond  the 
days  of  Agamem^non  in  long  millenniums,  and  the  ruined  walls  of 
Cnossus  and  Hissarlik  are  marked  with  the  flow  and  ebb  of  many 
wars  and  the  movements  of  dim,  prehistoric  peoples,  no  trace  of 
Minoan  epics  has  been  found.  Delicately  frescoed  walls  and  master- 
pieces of  the  goldsmith's  art  remain  to  tell  us  of  the  splendor  of  the 
sea-lords  of  Crete  or  the  rich  cattle-lords  of  the  Argive  plain,  but 
the  one  great  tale  which  the  Greeks  preserved  of  that  "Pelasgian" 
past  was  of  its  overthrow.  What  they  knew  of  the  ancient  civiliza- 
tion which  preceded  their  own  was  slight  enough.  In  the  Homeric 
poems  there  are  lingering  traces  of  the  splendor  of  Mycenae  and 
idyllic  glimpses  of  the  island-dwellers,  but  the  heroes  are  of  a  later 
day  and  a  different  race.  And  yet,  slight  as  they  are,  those  traces 
are  so  true  to  what  the  spade  reveals,  that  some  source  must  have 
kept  alive  the  story  from  the  great  days  of  Crete  (Middle  Minoan) 
to  those  of  Homer .^  Moreover,  two  of  the  most  scholarly  researchers 
of  Greece,  still  centuries  later,  Aristotle  and  Ephorus,  speak  with 
such  seeming  confidence  and  reasonable  accuracy  of  the  age  of 
Minos,  that  one  is  forced  to  suppose  that  Minoan  culture  left  some 

^  Archaeology  is  steadily,  if  slowly,  bridging  the  gulf  from  the  "historic"  to  the 
prehistoric  periods.  See  Arthur  Evaas'  survey  of  progress :  The  Minoan  and  Mycenaan 
Element  in  Hellenic  Life  in  The  Journal  of  Hellenic  Studies,  Vol.  XXXII  (191 2),  pp. 
277  sqq. 

128 


FROM  HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS  129 

genuine,  historic  documents.  What  they  were  no  one  knows.  It 
is  the  hope  of  historians  that  when  Minoan  script  can  be  deciphered, 
the  tablets  which  have  been  found  in  the  palace  of  Cnossus  will 
prove  to  contain,  along  with  business  records  of  the  kings,  some 
sort  of  royal  annal  like  those  of  Assyria  and  Babylonia.  But  so 
far  "Homer"  remains,  in  spite  of  archaeology,  what  it  has  been  from 
long  before  the  days  of  Herodotus,  the  earliest  account  of  the  Greek 
past ;  and,  although  we  shall  find  the  real  origins  of  Greek  history- 
writing  rather  in  a  criticism  of  Homeric  legends  than  in  the  legends 
themselves,  scholars  are  agreed  today  that  in  main  outlines  the 
Homeric  epics  are  based  upon  real  events.  The  tale  of  the  siege 
of  Troy  may  be  a  free  treatment  of  diverse  incidents  from  the  story 
of  the  Hellenic  "migrations,"  and  the  present  text  be  but  a  local 
variation  of  rival  sagas  which  chance  and  Athenian  culture  secured 
for  posterity,  but  in  the  picture  of  society  and  in  the  very  tangle 
of  the  story  there  is  much  of  genuine  historical  value.  The  Iliad 
furnishes  light  upon  the  finds  of  the  archaeologist  as  archaeology 
throws  light  upon  the  historicity  of  the  Iliad} 

It  is  no  part  of  a  history  of  History  to  discuss  the  still  unsolved 
question,  "Who  wrote  the  Homeric  poems?  "^  The  personality 
of  the  blind  bard,  that  dim  but  pathetic  figure,  which  all  antiquity 
honored  as  the  supreme  epic  genius  of  Greece,  has  suffered  from 
the  attacks  of  a  century  of  criticism,  but  is  apparently  recovering 
once  more  in  a  reaction  against  too  sweeping  skepticism.^    It  was  in 

1  On  these  questions  see  G.  W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihler,  Hellenic  Civilization 
(191 5),  in  this  series. 

"^  This  problem  has  often  received  undue  emphasis  in  the  field  of  historiography. 
It  does  not  properly  belong  there,  since  history  began  less  in  the  epic  than  in  criticism 
of  the  epic.  The  influence  of  Homer  upon  Greek  ideas  and  thought  is  naturally  of 
supreme  interest  to  historians,  but  that  does  not  make  the  Odyssey  or  the  Iliad  history. 

3  Cf.  G.  W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihler,  Hellenic  Civilization,  Chap.  I,  Sect.  3. 
Botsford  sums  up  his  position  as  follows :  "  We  may  suppose  that  songs  and  perhaps 
other  literature  descriptive  of  the  splendors  of  Minoan  life  passed  down  into  the 
Middle  Age,  which  followed  the  Minoan  period,  and  into  the  language  of  the  Hellenes, 
and  that  Hellenic  bards  on  the  Greek  mainland  and  in  the  colonies  continued  to  sing 
the  glories  of  gods  and  heroes,  intermingling  their  own  customs  and  ideas  with  tradi- 
tions. The  greatest  of  these  bards  was  Homer,  who  lived  in  Asia  Minor,  perhaps  in 
the  ninth  or  eighth  century.  He  incorporated  nothing,  but  created  his  great  poems 
afresh,  making  use,  however,  of  much  traditional  matter.  The  Odyssey  was  composed 
after  the  Iliad;  yet  both  may  have  been  the  product  of  one  genius.  After  their  com- 
pletion by  Homer  the  poems  were  to  some  extent  interpolated." 


I30    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

1795  that  Friedrich  August  Wolf  (1759-1824)  published  his  epoch- 
making  Prolegomena  ad  Homerum  in  which  the  unity  of  the  poems 
was  attacked  and  "Homer"  was  dethroned  from  his  supreme 
position.^  During  the  nineteenth  century  the  poems  have  been 
studied  from  every  possible  angle,  and  as  the  study  of  compara- 
tive mythology  and  folk-lore  developed  alongside  the  progress  of 
philology,  the  tendency  was  to  view  them  more  and  more  as  folk- 
tales, welded  into  shape  by  various  poets  and  at  different  times. 
If  a  note  of  personal  authorship  seemed  to  dominate,  one  might 
fall  back  upon  the  fact  that  these  were  the  tales  of  a  folk  so  keenly 
individualistic  that  the  quahty  of  personality  could  not  fail  but 
shine  through  the  social  expression.  Indeed  these  two  elements,  the 
individual  and  the  general,  give  the  poems  their  double  charm  and 
have  assured  their  preservation  not  only  by  the  Greeks  but  by  those 
who  learned  Greek  to  know  them.  They  carry  with  them  the  vision 
of  beauty  and  the  Hving  fire  of  genius  and  at  the  same  time  take  on 
that  universal  outlook  and  interest  which  mark  out  the  folk-tale  from 
the  individual  creation.  We  have  pointed  out  how  records  engraved 
upon  stone  endure  while  traditions  change ;  but  here  was  a  tradition 
whose  words  themselves  acquired  immortaUty,  engraved,  not  simply 
in  the  memory,  but  in  the  whole  intellectual  life  of  a  people. 

The  Homeric  poems  were  to  the  Greeks  —  so  far  as  history 
goes  —  almost  what  the  Old  Testament  was  to  the  Jews.  Their 
authority  was  fastened  upon  the  Greek  mind  down  to  the  era  of 
its  full  intellectual  development.  The  early  Christian  Fathers 
accepted  them  in  this  light,  devoting  their  energies  merely  to  prove 
that  the  narrative  of  Moses  was  prior  to  that  of  the  Greeks.^  It 
is  a  singular  parallel  that  modern  scholarship  developed  the  higher 
criticism  of  Homer  and  Moses  side  by  side,^  and  applying  with  im- 

1  On  Wolf,  see  especially  S.  Reiter  in  Neue  Jahrhiichcr  JUr  das  klassische  Aller- 
tunt,  Vol.  XIII  (1904),  pp.  89  sqq. 

2  Not  the  least  interesting  passages  bearing  upon  this  authority  of  Homer  are  the 
sections  of  Justin  Martyr's  Appeal  to  the  Greeks  {Ad  Grmcos  Cohortatio) ,  in  which  he 
places  Homer  alongside  Plato  as  the  two  main  sources  of  pagan  theology.  Justin 
ingeniously  proves,  with  the  display  of  considerable  learning,  that  Homer  as  well 
as  Plato  borrowed  the  better  side  of  the  Greek  system  from  Moses.  This  line  of 
argument  was  followed  by  many  a  Christian  Father  and  ultimately  worked  into  sys- 
tematic shape,  as  in  Eusebius'  chronicle  {Chronicorttm  Liber  Primus) . 

2  Especially  through  the  influence  of  F.  A.  Wolf  upon  Germany's  scholarship  at 
the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century. 


FROM   HOMER  TO   HERODOTUS  131 

partial  judgment  the  same  tests  to  both,  has  revealed  in  each  case 
the  same  art  of  composite  authorship  and  the  gradual  formation 
of  canon.  Whether  Pisistratus,  who  was  credited  with  having 
got  the  speciahsts  in  Homer  together,  in  the  sixth  century,  for  the 
preparation  of  an  orthodox  text,  was  really  the  Nehemiah  of  the 
Greeks  or  not,^  the  great  scholars  at  Alexandria  seem  to  have  been 
finally  responsible  for  the  text  as  we  have  it.  For  not  only  are  the 
Iliad  and  the  Odyssey  composite  poems  built  out  of  materials  of 
various  origins,  but  the  poems  which  have  survived  are  only  parts  of 
wide  cycles  of  the  "Homeric"  saga.  Local  poets  adapted  and  con- 
tinued the  poems  to  suit  the  audience.  "Every  self-respecting 
city  sought  to  connect  itself  through  its  ancient  clans  with  the 
Homeric  heroes."  ^  It  is  no  wonder  that  many  cities  claimed  to  be 
the  birthplace  of  the  legendary  poet ;  doubtless  many  were  ! 

Alongside  "Homer"  stands  "Hesiod,"  somewhat  as  a  Words- 
worth would  stand  alongside  a  mightier  Scott.  Hesiod  comes  but 
indirectly  within  our  survey,  through  the  influence  of  his  poems 
upon  subsequent  writers.  He  is  no  minstrel  with  a  tale,  but  a 
peasant  moralizer  with  a  gift  of  homely  wisdom  and  an  interest  in 
theology.  His  poems  attempt  no  sustained  and  glorious  flight. 
His  Works  and  Days  are  the  "works  and  days"  of  a  simple  Boeotian 
farmer,  interested  in  his  crops,  the  weather  and  the  injustice  of 
men.  The  Theogony,  the  opening  chapter  of  the  Greek  Genesis, 
tells  the  story  of  the  birth  of  the  gods  and  their  deahngs  with  men. 
Neither  would  be  mentioned  in  a  history  of  History  on  its  own 
account  were  it  not  that  in  the  Works  and  Days  one  finds  the  first 
statement  of  that  familiar  scheme  of  the  ages,  into  the  age  of  gold, 
of  silver,  of  bronze  and  of  iron,^  which  has  beguiled  the  fancy  of 
so  many  a  dreamer  in  later  centuries,  —  in  that  long  "age  of  iron" 
in  which  all  dreamers  live ;  and  that  in  the  Theogony  we  are  given  a 
straightforward  account  of  the  myth  basis  of  the  ancient  Greek 
idea  of  the  origins  of  society.  Hesiod  furnishes  us,  therefore,  in 
the  one  poem  with  a  framework  for  the  successive  epochs  of  social 

^  Gilbert  Murray  doubts  it.     See  his  short  but  suggestive  survey  of  the  growth 
of  the  Homeric  canon  in  his  History  of  Ancient  Greek  Literature,  pp.  10  sqq. 
^  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians  (1909),  p.  2. 
'  With  a  Homeric  age  thrown  in  between  bronze  and  iron. 


132    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

development,  a  scheme  of  world-history,  and  in  the  other  a  picture 
of  those  divine  factors  which  account  for  the  process  itself.  In 
short,  we  have  a  philosophy  of  history,  —  unphilosophical  and  un- 
historical,  —  although  in  the  Hellenic  Genesis  mankind  loses  the 
Eden  of  the  gods  slowly  and  by  the  very  character  of  successive 
cultures.  There  is  the  germ  of  a  gospel  of  Rousseau  in  the  outlook 
of  Hesiod. 

But  none  of  this  is  history.  Homer  no  more  than  Hesiod.  It  is 
poetry,  romance,  art,  the  creation  of  imagination,  the  idealization 
of  both  reahties  and  dreams.  History  began  in  another  and  more 
obscure  setting.  Indeed,  in  a  sense  this  poetic  material  blocked 
its  path.  From  the  standpoint  of  science  art  overdid  itself ;  the 
poems  were  too  well  done.  They  prevented  the  Greeks  from  look- 
ing for  any  other  narrative,  —  for  what  could  the  past  oflfer  so 
satisfactory,  so  glorious  as  the  deeds  of  the  saga  which  everybody 
knew  and  the  golden  age  of  gods  and  men  in  which  every  one  be- 
lieved? So  the  past  was  clothed  with  the  colors  of  romance.  It 
held  something  more  than  the  good  old  days.  A  magic  of  antique 
Arabian  Nights  lay  beyond  its  misty  boundary,  and  the  tales  one 
told  of  it  were  for  entertainment  rather  than  for  instruction.  The 
present  was  an  age  of  iron  —  it  always  is ;  but  the  gleam  of  the 
age  of  gold  could  still  be  caught  —  as  it  can  even  today  —  when 
the  memory  was  a  poem.  If  the  epics  stimulated  a  sense  of  the 
past  they  perverted  it  as  well.  The  perspective  of  the  early  ages 
of  Hellas,  as  seen  in  them,  stretched  by  real  cities  and  dealt  with  real 
heroes,  but  they  included  as  well  so  much  fantastic  material  that 
the  genuine  exploits  could  not  be  distinguished  from  those  invented 
to  suit  the  audience. 

There  is  another  way  in  which  the  poetry  which  was  the  glory  of 
early  Greek  Hterature  seems  to  have  hindered  the  development  of 
history.  It  placed  the  emphasis  upon  individuals.  No  epic  can 
have  as  its  subject  the  origins  of  a  civic  constitution ;  it  must  deal 
with  men,  with  Hfe  and  death  and  great  exploits  and  the  rapt 
tragedy  of  haunting  fate.  History  may  include  all  this,  but  it  is 
more.  It  deals  with  society  as  such,  with  pohtics  and  the  sober 
commonplace  of  business;  it  records  the  changes  in  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  city  and  the  hardships  of  the  debtors  in  the  days 


FROM  HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS  133 

of  rising  prices  as  well  as  the  raids  of  robber  cattle-lords.  Now, 
whether  it  was  owing  to  the  epics  or  not,  the  Greeks  while  keenly 
alert  about  the  politics  of  the  present,  were,  down  to  the  latter  part 
of  the  sixth  century  and  even  later,  satisfied  with  what  Homer 
had  to  tell  them  of  their  origin.  This  is  long  after  they  had  de- 
veloped more  than  one  complicated  political  structure.  Highly 
organized  states,  filled  with  a  critical,  inquisitive  and  sophisticated 
citizenship,  still  accepted  the  naive  traditions  of  their  past,  and 
continued  building  upon  the  general  theme  still  newer  myths  to 
connect  themselves  with  the  ancient  heroes. 

It  is  difficult  to  realize  that  no  real  history,  in  our  sense  of  the 
word,  was  produced  in  Greece  until  in  the  climax  of  its  civilization. 
The  theme  of  the  first  prose  writers  continued  to  be  Hke  that  of 
the  poets,  less  poHtics  than  the  story  of  heroes  or  noble  clans. 
Herodotus  himself  was  the  first  political  historian,  the  first  to  deal 
in  systematic  form  with  the  evolution  of  states  and  the  affairs 
of  nations ;  and  Herodotus,  after  all,  came  late.  One  forgets  that 
the  naive  tales  of  the  Father  of  History  were  composed  far  along 
in  Grecian  history,  in  the  age  of  Pericles  and  by  the  friend  of 
Sophocles.  Athens  had  already  achieved  democracy,  the  creations 
of  such  men  as  Solon,  Cleisthenes  or  even  Aristides  were  already 
things  of  the  past,  before  a  poHtical  history  was  written. 

It  was  not  because  the  Greeks  lacked  curiosity  as  to  their  past, 
that  their  performance  in  history-writing  was  so  long  delayed.  The 
trouble  was  that  their  curiosity  was  satisfied  by  something  else 
than  history.  What  they  needed  to  develop  history  and  historians 
was  criticism,  skeptical  criticism,  instead  of  blind  acceptance  of  the 
old  authority.  This  criticism  first  showed  itself  in  the  cities  of 
Ionia,  and  with  it  came  into  existence  not  only  history  but  that 
new  intellectual  life,  that  vita  nuova,  which  marks  out  the  achieve- 
ments of  the  Hellenic  genius  from  all  the  previous  history  of  the 
human  mind,  —  that  philosophy  which  was  science,  and  that  science 
which  was  art. 

The  scene  of  this  renaissance  was  not  Athens  nor  anywhere 
on  the  mainland  of  Greece.  Farther  to  the  east,  where  the  rocky 
coast  of  Asia  crumbles  and  plunges  into  the  ^Egean,  lay  the  cities 
of  the  Ionian  Greeks.     A  little  fringe  of  cities,  a  half-dozen  or  so, 


134    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

on  hill-crest  or  by  the  deep  waters  of  half-hidden  bays,  these  settle- 
ments played  no  role  in  the  political  history  of  the  world  Kke  the 
states  of  the  Nile  or  Euphrates  valleys.  They  had  no  great  career 
of  conquest  and  erected  no  empire.  Few,  even  today,  have  ever 
heard  of  them.  And  yet  the  history  of  civilization  owes  to  them  a 
debt  hardly  less  than  to  Egypt  or  Babylon.  It  was  there  that 
critical  thought  dawned  for  the  western  world.  In  them  began 
that  bold  and  free  spirit  of  investigation  which  became  the  mark  of 
the  Hellenic  mind. 

They  held  the  key  between  East  and  West.  They  had  held  it 
some  centuries  before  Darius  found  them  in  possession  of  it,  in- 
solently tempting  and  then  suffering  his  anger.  Long  before  that 
fateful  fifth  century  when  they  were  to  serve  as  the  medium  to 
bring  East  and  West  to  war,  they  had  been  the  agents  of  another 
kind  of  intercourse.  For,  just  behind,  through  the  valley  of  the 
Meander  and  passing  the  mountain  fastnesses  of  Phrygia  and 
Lydia,  lay  that  overland  caravan  route  which  stretched  through 
Asia  Minor  by  old  Hittite  towns  to  touch,  at  Carchemish,  the 
bazaars  of  Assyria.  Along  it  moved  the  Oriental-Western  trade. 
By  the  southern  coast  they  met  Phoenician  ships,  bringing  goods, 
and  perhaps  an  alphabet.  Along  the  islands  to  the  west  and  up 
the  coast  to  the  Black  Sea  their  own  ships  came  and  went,  gather- 
ing in  that  commerce  which  had  brought  wealth  to  Troy,  and 
planting  their  colonies.  They  were  kin  with  the  masters  of  Attica, 
and  held  an  even  larger  share  than  they  of  that  still  more  ancient 
culture  which  flourished  in  Crete  and  along  the  ^gean  before  the 
days  of  Homer  and  the  steel  swords  of  the  north.  They  were 
Greeks,  sharing  the  common  heritage.  But  it  was  from  the  bar- 
barians rather  than  from  Hellas  that  the  inspiration  came  which 
set  going  the  new  scientific  spirit.  A  knowledge  of  the  world 
outside  brought  out  and  fed  the  native  thirst  for  more  ;  and  as  the 
diversities  of  civilization  opened  up  before  them,  with  possibilities 
of  comparison,  such  as  Egyptians  or  Babylonians  never  enjoyed, 
they  grew  more  curious  and  more  skeptical  at  the  same  time. 
They  had  acquired  an  external  point  of  view  from  which  to  judge 
of  their  own  traditions.  The  naive  primitive  faith  began  to  suffer 
from  a  growing  sophistication,  and  in  this  movement  of  intellectual 
clarification  there  were  some  who  attacked  the  Homeric  tradition 


FROM  HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS  135 

in  somewhat  the  same  spirit  as  the  philosophers  of  the  eighteenth 
century  attacked  the  traditional  theologies  of  Christendom. 
Before  500  B.C.,  Xenophanes,  the  philosopher,  denounced  the  myths 
of  Homer  and  Hesiod,  because  such  miraculous  occurrences  are 
impossible  in  the  face  of  the  regularity  of  the  laws  of  nature.  In 
such  a  setting  was  born  "history."  ^ 

The  exact  origins  are  confused  and  uncertain.  As  we  have  seen 
already,  the  word  "history"  (iaropLT])  as  used  by  these  Ionian 
Greeks  would  apply  rather  to  the  investigations  which  character- 
ized the  whole  intellectual  movement  than  to  that  one  branch  to 
which  it  was  ultimately  limited.  The  "historian"  was  the  truth- 
seeker.  The  word  was  already  used  in  this  sense  in  the  Iliad,  where 
quarrelling  parties  in  disputes  at  law  came  shouting  "  Let  us  make 
Agamemnon,  Atreus'  son,  our  arbitrator,  [our  'histor']."^  Ob- 
viously, by  the  word  "histor  "  Homer  had  in  mind  the  wise  man  who 
knows  the  tribal  customs  and  can  get  at  the  rights  of  the  case. 
Such  skilled  "truth-seekers"  are  to  be  found  in  all  semi-barbarous 
peoples.  The  Roman  gucBstor — he  who  inquires  —  carried  the  office 
over  into  the  formal  magistracy.  But  truth-seeking  is  not  con- 
fined to  law-courts.  One  might  "inquire"  of  oracles  as  well.^ 
It  is  noteworthy  that  a  word  with  such  possibilities,  which  in  Israel 
might  have  headed  for  religion  and  in  Rome  for  law,'*  was  in  Greece 
kept  clear  of  even  philosophy.  In  spite  of  the  myths  with  which 
it  had  so  long  to  deal,  the  inquiry  was  in  the  world  of  living  men ; 
it  is  a  secular  task,  and  a  human  one.  There  is  in  it,  apparently 
from  the  first,  a  sense  of  hard  fact,  which  sooner  or  later  was  to  get 
rid  of  illusions.  How  it  steered  clear  of  philosophy  is  more  difficult 
to  tell.  It  has  been  stated  that  "history"  to  the  lonians  of  the 
sixth  century  was  much  what  the  Athenians  of  the  fourth  century 
termed  philosophy.^     But  the  same  matter-of-fact  quality  which 

»  Cf.  D.  G.  Hogarth,  Ionia  and  the  East  (1909) ;  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek 
Historians,  p.  10. 

Since  this  paragraph  was  written  (some  years  ago),  a  very  similar  treatment  has 
appeared  in  F.  S.  Marvin's  Living  Past  (1913). 

2  Iliad,  Bk.  XXIII,  1.  486.    Cf.  Bk.  XVIII,  1.  501  for  similar  use. 

3  Cf.  Euripides,  Ion,  1,  1547.  A  collection  of  them  was  kept  for  reference  in  the 
Acropolis  at  Athens.     Cf.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  V,  Chap.  XC. 

^  Cf.  the  opening  phrase  of  Justinian's  Institutes,  "Law  is  .  .  .  the  knowledge  of 
things  human  and  divine." 

^  Cf.  G.  Murray,  A  History  of  Ancient  Greek  Literature,  p.  123. 


136    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

swept  it  far  away  from  the  idea  of  divine  inspiration,  also  kept 
it  from  being  lost  in  abstraction.  Philosophia  —  love  of  knowledge 
—  might  come  to  mean  speculations  about  speculations ;  but 
historia  continued  at  its  humbler,  but  more  fundamental  task  of 
inquiring  for  the  data.  There  is  already  a  hint  of  its  scientific  possi- 
bilities in  the  fact  that  when  Aristotle  included  in  his  philosophy 
an  account  of  the  actual,  living  world,  he  gave  to  this  part  of  his 
survey  the  title  Natural  History.  To  Aristotle,  however,  the 
term  still  in  the  main  carried  with  it  the  connotation  of  "  research." 
It  is  only  in  the  work  of  the  last  of  the  great  Greek  historians, 
Polybius,  that  this  meaning  shifts  definitely  from  inquiry  to 
narrative.  To  Polybius,  intent  as  he  was  upon  the  scientific 
aspect  of  his  work,  this  gradual  change  in  usage  may  have  passed 
unnoticed ;  but  it  is  none  the  less  significant  of  unscientific  pos- 
sibilities. For  if  historia  escaped  religion  and  metaphysics  it  was 
captured  by  literature. 

None  of  these  distinctions,  however,  was  possible  in  the  Ionia 
of  the  sixth  century.  The  very  breadth  of  the  term  prevented  one 
thinking  of  "historia"  as  mere  history.  Even  Herodotus,  although 
the  usage  was  narrowing  in  his  time,  could  hardly  have  imagined 
himself  the  Father  of  History  in  the  later  sense  of  the  word.  His 
''inquiry"  was  geography  as  well ;  it  included  descriptions  of  phys- 
ical features  of  countries  along  with  the  occupations  and  achieve- 
ments of  their  inhabitants.  The  whole  miscellaneous  survey  was 
his  "history."  But  the  surprising  thing  is  that  those  sections  which 
to  us  are  the  historical  sections  par  excellence,  the  narratives  of 
happenings  beyond  the  memory  of  his  qwn  time  or  outside  the 
possibility  of  his  own  inquiry,  are  called  by  another  name.  There 
are  several  of  these  embedded  in  his  vast  mosaic,  large  enough  to 
be  "histories"  by  themselves,  the  story  of  Croesus  and  Lydia,  of 
Egypt,  of  Scythia  or  of  Thrace ;  but  these  narratives  of  the  things 
really  past  are  termed  not  "histories"  but  "sayings"  —  logoi. 

This  means  that  they  are  secondary  sources,  as  it  were,  narra- 
tives of  other  men,  which  he  cannot  verify  by  his  own  inquiry 
or  "history."  It  means  more,  however.  For  logos  was  already  a 
technical  term;^  it  was  what  a  man  had  to  say,  —  his  "story" 
in  about  the  sense  in  which  the  word  is  used  by  journalists  today  — 
'  The  Latin  sertno  (our  sermon)  has  had  a  somewhat  similar  history. 


FROM  HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS  137 

a  deliverance  in  prose.  Hence  prose-writers  in  Ionia  were  termed 
logographoi,  and  it  is  under  this  heading  that  one  finds,  in  most 
histories  of  Greek  literature,  the  founders  of  history.^ 

The  prose  in  history  came  by  way  of  city  chroniclers  (wpoi) ,  who 
were  busied  in  the  Ionian  cities,  as  elsewhere,  in  carrying  back  the 
story  to  Homer's  heroes  and  Hesiod's  gods.^  Possibly  because 
they  took  material  from  temple  and  civic  records,^  they  broke  away 
from  verse  and  put  their  "sayings"  into  prose.  This  in  itself  was 
a  real  liberation,  but  the  results  came  slowly.  The  subject  seems 
generally  to  have  been  the  genealogical  story  of  noble  clans,  —  a 
subject  to  try  the  most  scientific  of  tempers,  especially  if  one's 
livelihood  depends  upon  a  successful  artistic  performance.  Yet 
it  was  from  among  these  men  that  the  critical  impulse  came. 
Among  them  arose  some  who  grew  skeptical  of  the  legends  it  was 
their  business  to  relate  and  so  became  "truth-seekers"  through  a 
widened  inquiry  for  the  data  of  the  past. 

At  the  head  of  the  hst  of  some  thirty  of  these  logographers 
whose  names,  but  not  whose  works,  have  come  down  to  us,  a  Greek 
tradition  placed  the  "misty  figure""*  of  Cadmus  of  Miletus. 
Whether  the  fabled  inventor  of  Greek  letters  was  rather  one  of  the 
real  inventors  of  Greek  prose,  the  city  whose  origins  he  is  said  to 
have  described^  produced  soon  after  the  middle  of  the  sixth  cen- 
tury a  prose  writer  who,  both  as  narrator  of  the  past  of  his  own 
people  and  geographer  of  the  world  at  large,  may  be  regarded  as 
the  direct  forerunner  of  Herodotus.  Hecataeus  of  Miletus  is  the 
first  "historian,"  whose  works  —  even  in  fragments  —  have  come 

^Herodotus  refers  to  Hecataeus  as  "the  maker  of  prose,"  XoyoiroLos.  Thu- 
cydides  includes  Herodotus  among  the  \oyoypa.<l>oi.  The  use  of  the  term  by  modern 
writers  to  apply  to  these  early  historians  dates  from  F.  Creuzer's  Die  hislorisclie  Kunst 
der  Griechen  .  .  .  (1803,  2d  ed.,  1845).  ^^  the  subject  in  general,  seeW.  v.  Christ, 
Gesckichte  der  griechischen  Litteratur  (2  vols.,  5th  and  6th  ed.,  1908-1913),  (6th  ed.), 
Vol.1,  pp.  449  sqq.;  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Histoire  de  la  liUerature  grecquc  (5  vols.,  2d 
ed.,  1896-1899;  3d  ed..  Vols.  I-HI,  1910-1914),  (2d  ed.).  Vol.  II,  pp.  544  sqq.; 
G.  Murray,  ^  History  of  Ancient  Greek  Literature,  p.  124;  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient 
Greek  Historians,  Lect.  i. 

^  C/.  M.  Vogt,  Die  griechischen  Lokalhisloriker,  in  Neue  JahrhOcher  fiir  classische 
Philologie,  Sup.  Vol.  XXVII  (1901),  pp.  699-786. 

^  Such  documents  and  inscriptions  as  were  sure  to  be  found  in  the  important 
shrines  and  in  the  public  offices. 

■*  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  pp.  14-15.  There  is  a  good  short 
summary  here  of  the  Cadmus  problem.  ^  The  Foundations  of  Miletus. 


138    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

down  to  us,  the  first  of  whom  we  have  any  real  knowledge  of  the 
line  of  those  who  criticised  their  sources  and  so  devoted  themselves 
to  that  "search  for  truth"  which  was  to  be  the  mark  of  the  his- 
torian's profession.^  But  it  must  be  admitted  that  his  claim  to 
this  distinction  rests  rather  upon  a  single  phrase  —  the  opening 
words  of  his  Genealogies  —  than  upon  the  substance  of  the 
passages  which  have  been  preserved.  His  life  was  passed  in  that 
age  when  the  great  conflict  between  East  and  West  began,  and 
his  home  was  the  city  which,  perhaps  more  than  any  other,  forced 
it  on.  The  two  eras,  therefore,  which  met  in  that  rapid  epoch, 
are  reflected  in  his  works.  Two  alone  are  attributed  to  him,  an 
account  of  his  Travels  around  the  World,^  and  a  book  of  local 
Genealogies,  the  one  a  description  of  the  Persian  world  by  a  much- 
travelled  subject  of  the  great  king,  the  other  a  story  of  his  city's 
heroes  by  a  patriot  Greek.  Of  the  two,  the  book  of  travels  would 
seem  —  and  did  seem  to  the  Greeks  —  to  be  the  more  important. 
It  revealed  the  modern  world  to  those  who  were  to  take  over  its 
heritage.  But  it  is  the  other  book  which  mainly  concerns  us  here. 
There  was  in  it  the  promise  of  something  which  makes  it,  in  spite 
of  its  obscure  and  relatively  trifling  subject,  one  of  the  epoch- 
making  contributions  in  the  long  story  of  our  intellectual  emanci- 
pation. It  applied  the  new-won  knowledge  to  criticise  the  ancient 
myths.  Its  opening  words  seem  to  mark  the  dawn  of  a  new  era : 
"Hecataeus  of  Miletus  thus  speaks:  I  write  what  I  deem  true; 
for  the  stories  of  the  Greeks  are  manifold  and  seem  to  me  ridiculous." 
Ringing  words,  that  sound  like  a  sentence  from  Voltaire.  Un- 
fortunately, as  has  been  indicated  above,  the  few  fragments  in 
our  possession  hardly  lead  one  to  suppose  that  the  actual  achieve- 
ment of  Hecatseus  measures  up  to  his  ideals.  We  know  that  he 
did  not,  like  Xenophanes,  the  philosopher,  deny  the  myths  in  the 

1  On  Hecataeus  see  E.  H.  Bunbury,  A  History  of  Ancient  Geography  among  the 
Greeks  and  the  Romans  (2  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1883),  Vol.  I;  H.  Berger,  Geschichte  der 
■wisscnschajtlichen  Erdkunde  der  Griechen  (1903);  W.  v.  Christ,  Geschichte  der 
griechischen  Litteratur  (6th  ed.),  Vol.  I,  pp.  451  sqq.;  R.  H.  Klausen,  Hecatcei 
Milcsii  Fragmenta  (1831);  E.  Meyer,  Forschiingen  zur  alten  Geschichte  (2  vols.,  1892- 
1899),  sections  on  i/eroJoto5, /»a55m;   C.  M.\x\\tr,  Fragmenta  Historicorum  Gracorum. 

^  rijs  irepiodos  in  two  books,  one  on  Europe,  and  the  other  on  Asia.  On  one 
aspect  of  this,  with  good  bibliography,  see  B.  Schulze,  De  Hecalai  Milesii  Frag- 
mentis  qua  ad  Italiam  Meridionalem  Spectant  (191 2), 


FROM  HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS  139 

Homeric  legend  on  the  basis  of  a  priori  scientific  impossibility; 
his  criticism  was  the  product  of  a  comparative  study  of  mythology 
and  history,  rather  than  an  application  of  Ionian  philosophy.  It 
was  as  a  geographer  that  he  brought  the  comparative  method  to 
correct  the  pseudo-historical.  The  open  world  he  travelled  was 
responsible  for  the  open  mind. 

Strangely  enough,  Herodotus  records,  in  a  notable  passage,  an 
incident  in  the  life  of  Hecataeus  which  must  have  contributed 
largely  to  produce  this  first  emphatic  criticism  of  historical  sources. 
It  is  not  too  long  to  quote : 

''When  Hecataeus,  the  historian,  was  at  Thebes,  and,  dis- 
coursing of  his  genealogy,  traced  his  descent  to  a  god  in  the  person 
of  his  sixteenth  ancestor,  the  priests  of  Jupiter  did  to  him  exactly 
as  they  afterwards  did  to  me,  though  I  made  no  boast  of  my  family. 
They  led  me  into  the  inner  sanctuary,  which  is  a  spacious  chamber, 
and  showed  me  a  multitude  of  colossal  statues,  in  wood,  which  they 
counted  up  and  found  to  amount  to  the  exact  number  they  had  said ; 
the  custom  being  for  every  high-priest  during  his  lifetime  to  set  up 
his  statue  in  the  temple.  As  they  showed  me  the  figures  and  reckoned 
them  up,  they  assured  me  that  each  was  the  son  of  the  one  preceding 
him ;  and  this  they  repeated  throughout  the  whole  line,  beginning 
with  the  representation  of  the  priest  last  deceased,  and  continuing 
until  they  had  completed  the  series.  When  Hecataeus,  in  giving 
his  genealogy,  mentioned  a  god  as  his  sixteenth  ancestor  the  priests 
opposed  their  genealogy  to  his,  going  through  this  list,  and  refusing 
to  allow  that  any  man  was  ever  born  of  a  god.  Their  colossal 
figures  were  each,  they  said,  a  Piromis,  born  of  a  Piromis,  and  the 
number  of  them  was  three  hundred  and  forty-five;  through  the 
whole  series,  Piromis  followed  Piromis,  and  the  line  did  not  run  up 
either  to  a  god  or  a  hero.  The  word  Piromis  may  be  rendered 
'gentleman.'  "  ^ 

One  must  recall  the  situation.  Egypt  had  been  thrown  open 
by  Cambyses,  and  had  now  become  the  university  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean world.  How  much  it  had  to  teach  the  inquisitive  Greeks, 
as  well  as  the  Asiatics,  we  are  only  today  discovering ;  but  the  eager 
narrative  of  Herodotus  shows  how  many  such  interviews  as  those 
at  Thebes  the  priests  of  Egypt  had  been  granting  to  the  half- 

^  The  History  of  Herodotus ,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  CXLIII.   (Rawlinson's  translation,  2d  ed.) 


I40    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

barbarian  Hellenes.  Hecatasus  had  gone  there  believing  in  his 
own  traditions,  *' boasting"  of  them,  as  Herodotus  implies.  The 
splendors  of  the  river  valley  from  Sais  to  Thebes  —  six  hundred 
miles  of  a  museum  street  —  had  hardly  broken  the  crust  of  his 
Greek  provincialism.  He  could  at  least  offer  a  rival  to  Egyptian 
antiquity  in  the  imaginative  conceptions  of  the  Olympian  sages. 
Then  came  the  impressive  spectacle  of  centuries  of  a  human  past 
made  visible  and  real  and  stretching  out  before  his  eyes ;  and  it 
cast  ridicule  upon  the  slight  and  relatively  insignificant  Hellenic 
past.  Evidently  Hecataeus  had  described  his  own  confusion  or 
Herodotus  would  not  have  referred  to  it  in  this  off-hand  way.  If 
so,  the  incident  may  well  have  stood  out  in  his  own  mind  as  an 
experience  of  decisive  importance  in  the  moulding  of  his  point  of 
view.  We  might  not  be  far  wrong,  then,  if  we  were  to  date  —  so 
far  as  such  things  can  be  dated — ^the  decisive  awakening  of  that 
critical,  scientific  temper,  which  was  to  produce  the  new  science 
of  history,  from  the  interview  in  the  dark  temple-chamber  of 
the  priests  of  Thebes.  Yet  we  must  not  forget  that  it  was  the 
Greek  visitor  and  not  the  learned  Egyptian  priests  who  applied 
the  lesson.  How  much  the  skepticism  of  thinkers  at  home  had 
already  predisposed  Hecataeus  to  critical  attitude  we  cannot  tell. 
But  then  we  need  not  try  to  ''explain"  the  mind  of  one  of  whom 
we  know  little  more  than  what  is  given  here ;  especially  since, 
even  in  that  little,  we  see  that  Hecataeus  had  a  mind  of  his 
own. 

Hecataeus  is  the  only  one  of  the  logographers  to  whom  Herodotus 
pays  the  tribute  of  naming  as  a  source.  Modern  scholarship  has 
interested  itself  in  attempting  to  estimate  how  much  the  Father 
of  History  actually  was  indebted  to  his  pioneering  predecessor,  but 
the  problem  belongs  rather  to  the  criticism  of  Herodotus  than  to 
that  of  Hecataeus  and  is  too  detailed  for  such  a  survey  as  this.  The 
general  conclusion  is  that  Herodotus  was  even  more  in  debt  than 
he  admitted,  and  that  the  earlier  traveller  not  only  supplied  his 
successor  with  notes  for  his  history  but  a  guide  for  his  actual  travels 
as  well.  If  this  be  so,  it  is  all  the  more  remarkable  how  Herodotus 
takes  particular  pains  to  discredit  and  ridicule  Hecataeus.  He 
repeatedly  expresses  his  scorn  of  the  geographers  who  adhere  to 
the  old  Homeric  cosmography  and  believe  in  the  existence  of  an 


FROM   HOMER  TO  HERODOTUS  141 

*' Ocean  stream"  that  bounds  the  world.^  This  attitude  of  critical 
superiority  is  not  due  to  the  possession  by  the  critic  of  any  superior 
technique  in  research,  since  he  himself  could  make  as  grotesque 
concessions  to  myth,  as,  for  example,  in  the  accounts  of  the  phoenix 
and  hippopotamus,  —  the  latter  having,  according  to  Herodotus,^ 
cloven  hoof,  and  horse's  mane  and  tail.  It  was  not  in  the  descrip- 
tion of  such  detail  that  Herodotus  could  deny  the  merit  of  Hecataeus' 
achievement,  so  much  as  in  the  faulty  generalizations  which  tra- 
dition had  fastened  upon  Hecataeus  —  that  Homeric  map  of  the 
world  which  prevented  one  from  ever  forming  a  correct  impression 
of  geography  as  a  whole.  Hecataeus  had  been  a  great  traveller  and, 
we  suppose,  a  shrewd  observer,  but  he  was  unable  to  allow  the  body 
of  fact  he  gathered  to  overthrow  the  preconceived  ideas  of  the  world. 
Herodotus,  with  much  the  same  technique  but  greater  mastery, 
could  appreciate,  as  his  predecessor  failed  to  do,  that  where  the 
body  of  facts  runs  contrary  to  theory,  the  theory  must  go,  even  if 
it  have  the  weight  of  universal  acceptance.  Thus,  from  Hecataeus 
to  Herodotus  one  passes  a  further  step  toward  the  science  of  history. 
Hecataeus  after  all  was  only  a  logographer,  Herodotus  a  historian. 

It  is  impossible  to  go  into  detail  upon  the  work  of  these  lo- 
gographers.  The  writing  of  prose  narrative  is  no  improvement  upon 
verse  unless  the  author  avails  himself  of  its  freedom  to  be  more 
exacting  in  what  he  says,  and,  to  judge  from  the  scornful  comment 
of  Thucydides,^  the  chroniclers  were  little  better  historians  than 
the  poets  who  preceded  them.  But  Thucydides'  impatience  may 
not  be  altogether  justified  historically.  However  monastic  and 
prosy  these  prose-writers  became,  they  should  hardly  be  blamed 
for  their  failure  to  evolve  an  adequate  chronology,  especially  by 
the  author  of  the  Peloponnesian  War,  who  is  himself  so  careless  of 
the  calendar.    And,  however  uncritical  they  remain,  it  was  some- 

1  Cf.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  II,  Chaps.  XXI,  XXIII ;  Bk.  IV,  Chap. 
XXXVI,  etc. 

'^  According  to  Porphyry  (in  Eusebius'  Prceparatio  Evangelica,  Bk.  X,  Chap.  Ill) 
the  accounts  in  Herodotus,  History,  Bk.  II,  Chaps.  LXXI,  LXXIII,  were  taken  liter- 
ally from  Hecataeus.  Cf.  C.  Miiller,  Fragmenta  Historicoruin  Gracorum,  Vol.  I,  p.  21, 
who  attributes  the  last  part  of  the  phoenix  story  to  Hecataeus.  It  is  more  charitable 
to  discredit  Porphyry  as  G.  Rawlinson  does  {The  History  of  Herodotus,  4  vols.,  1858- 
1860;  2d  ed.,  1862;  3d  ed.,  1876;  2d  ed..  Vol.  I,  p.  40).  The  description  of  the 
hippopotamus  was  evidently  imagined  (by  some  one)  from  its  name. 

2  Cf.  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXI. 


142    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

thing  to  hand  down  the  documents  and  stories  of  the  past  much  as 
they  found  them.^  One  must  recall  the  whole  situation,  —  the 
vague  chronology,  the  involved  calendar,  the  unreliable  genealogies^ 
the  comparative  absence  of  even  bad  material  concerning  the  past, 
—  in  order  to  do  justice  to  these  blundering  logographers. 

How  little  advance  was  made,  however,  can  be  seen  from  the 
work  of  one  of  the  greatest  of  the  older  contemporaries  of  Herodotus, 
Hellanicus  of  Lesbos.  As  a  scholar  he  ranked  high.  He  used  ma- 
terials not  simply  from  Greece,  but  from  Asia  as  well,  to  straighten 
out  chronology  by  a  comparative  survey.  Then  he  consulted  the 
lists  of  the  archons  of  Athens  and  of  the  priestesses  of  Hera  at 
Argos  —  the  great  shrine  of  Hera  in  Greece  ^  —  as  basis  for  a 
chronicle  of  Attica  from  683-2  to  404  B.C.  But  after  all  his  labor, 
this  pagan  Eusebius  retained  a  genuinely  mediaeval  mind.  He 
reckoned,  as  did  Herodotus  and  every  one  else,  in  terms  of  genera- 
tions ;  but  as  these  might  have  a  33-year  unit,  or  a  23-year  or  40- 
year  unit,  the  result  is  most  unsatisfactory.  Moreover,  Hellanicus 
twisted  his  figures  as  well,  and  in  order  to  make  out  that  the  first 
mythical  king  of  Athens,  Ogygos,  was  as  old  as  the  founder  of  Argos, 
Phoroneus,  he  interpolated  five  kings  in  the  lists  of  Athens !  ^  It 
is  small  wonder  that  when  Thucydides  came  to  sketch  the  period 
of  history  between  the  Persian  war,  where  Herodotus  left  off,  and 
the  Peloponnesian  war,  where  his  own  work  began,  he  scornfully 
rejected  the  account  of  Hellanicus,  although  it  was  the  only  one 
in  existence,  and  rewrote  the  narrative  himself.^ 

Such  works,  which  had  now  left  poetry  so  far  behind  as  to  be  not 

1  Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus  says  {De  Thucydidis  Historits  Jtidiciuvt,  Chap.  V) 
that  they  did  not  add  or  subtract  anything.  But  this  hardly  conveys  the  right  im- 
pression.   They  were  jejune  but  not  necessarily  copyists. 

*  Cf.  C.  Waldstein,  The  Argive  Hermim  (2  vols.,  1902-1905),  Vol.  I,  p.  4. 

^  Cf.  E.  Meyer,  ForscJmngen  zur  alien  Geschichte,  Vol.  I,  pp.  176  sqq.;  H.  Kullmer, 
Die  Historiai  des  Hellanikos  von  Lesbos,  in  Jahrbucher  ftir  classische  Philologle,  Sup. 
Vol.  XXVII  (1901),  pp.  455-698;  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  pp.  27-35. 

*C/.  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  LXXXIX  to 
CXVIII,  and  especially  the  passage  in  Chapter  XCVII :  "I  have  gone  out  of  my  way 
to  speak  of  this  period  because  the  writers  who  have  preceded  me  treat  either  of 
Hellenic  affairs  previous  to  the  Persian  invasion  or  of  that  invasion  itself;  the  in- 
tervening portion  of  history  has  been  omitted  by  all  of  them,  with  the  exception  of 
Hellanicus;  and  he,  where  he  has  touched  upon  it  in  his  Attic  history,  is  very  brief 
and  inaccurate  in  his  chronology."     (Jowett's  translation.) 


FROM    HOMER   TO   HERODOTUS  143 

merely  prose  but  prosy,  were  those  upon  which  the  Greeks  of  the 
great  age  of  Athens  rested  their  ideas  of  chronology.  In  the  absence 
of  adequate  records,  history  was,  even  in  Hellas,  hardly  rising  above 
the  level  of  mediaeval  annals.  It  was  reserved  for  a  Herodotus  of 
Halicarnassus  to  combine  geography  and  history-narrative  with 
criticism  and  Hterature,  and  so  to  win  for  history  for  all  time  a 
distinct  place  in  the  arts  and  sciences  of  mankind. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

On  the  subjects  treated  generally  in  this  chapter  the  standard  histories 
of  Greek  literature  ofifer  many  suggestions  which  could  not  be  elaborated  in 
this  short  survey.  To  avoid  repetition  such  references  have  been  grouped  at 
the  end  of  the  next  chapter.  On  the  Homeric  question  the  student  is  referred 
to  G.  W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihier's  Hellenic  Civilization  (1915),  in  this  series. 

In  connection  with  this  and  the  following  chapters  on  Greek  and  Roman 
history,  the  student  is  reminded  of  the  excellent  guides  to  be  found  in  the 
more  recent  and  elaborate  classical  dictionaries  and  encyclopaedias.  The 
introductory  manual  on  Greek  antiquities  by  L.  Whibley,  A  Companion  to 
Greek  Studies  (3d  ed.,  1916),  contains  a  short  review  of  historical  literature. 
The  student  of  Latin  antiquities  wiU  find  a  good  starting  point  in  J.  E.  Sandys, 
A  Companion  to  Latin  Studies  (2d  ed.,  1913),  with  a  fair  comment  on  historians. 

For  bibliographical  apparatus  the  advanced  student  is  referred  to  the 
Jahreshericht  iiber  die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Altertumswissenschajt  where 
exhaustive  surveys  of  pertinent  recent  literature,  covering  both  Greek  and 
Latin  literatures,  may  be  found.  A  few  references  to  such  bibliographies 
have  been  made  in  some  of  the  following  chapters,  but  there  is  no  attempt 
to  supply  full  lists  of  titles.  That  would  more  properly  belong  to  the  com- 
panion volume  of  texts,  if  it  should  ever  be  completed. 


CIL\PTER  XIII 

^  HERODOTUS 

The  life  of  Herodotus  coincided  almost  exactly  with  the  years 
of  the  Athenian  supremacy,  those  sixty  years  or  so  which  lay  be- 
tween the  battle  of  Salamis  and  the  beginning  of  the  end  of  things 
in  the  Peloponnesian  war.  He  was  born  about  480  B.C.,  and  died 
after  430  B.C.  Practically  nothing  is  known  of  his  Hfe  except  what 
can  be  deduced  from  his  own  history.  His  native  city  was  Hali- 
carnassus,  a  Dorian  settlement  on  the  seacoast  of  Asia  Minor, 
where,  however,  inscriptional  remains  indicate  that  the  Ionic 
dialect  was  in  use.^  He  had  thus  accessible  for  his  history  the 
tongue  which  had  already  been  consecrated  to  prose  literature. 
But  while  he  wrote  their  language,  he  could  not  rid  himself  of  a 
strong  native  prejudice  against  the  lonians.  They  are  practically  the 
only  people  in  his  whole  narrative  to  whom  he  is  almost  consistently 
unfair.  They  "  have  built  their  cities  in  a  region  where  the  air  and 
climate  are  the  most  beautiful  in  the  whole  world ;  for  no  other  region 
isequally  blessed  with  Ionia,  neither  above  it  nor  below  it,  nor  east 
nor  west  of  it."  ^  Yet,  "of  all  its  [Greek]  tribes  the  Ionic  was  by  far 
the  feeblest  and  least  esteemed,  not  possessing  a  single  State  of  any 
mark  excepting  Athens.  The  Athenians  and  most  of  the  other 
Ionic  States  over  the  world  went  so  far  in  their  dislike  of  the  name 
as  actually  to  lay  it  aside  ;  and  even  at  the  present  day  the  greater 
number  of  them  seem  to  me  to  be  ashamed  of  it."  ^  Thus  he  brings 
his  neighbors  into  the  story,  borrowing  their  tongue  to  do  it !  And 
once  in  it,  they  fare  no  better.  His  jibes  sometimes  became  a  sneer, 
deftly  driven  home  by  the  rhetorical  device  of  having  some  one 
else  —  a  Scythian  for  instance  —  say  "by  way  of  reproach"  that 
the  lonians  "are  the  basest  and  most  dastardly  of  all  mankind  .  .  . 

^  This  disposes  of  the  difficulty  which  critics  had  found  in  his  use  of  it. 

2  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  CXLII. 

3  Ibid.,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  CXLIII. 

144 


HERODOTUS  145 

but  the  faithfullest  of  slaves."  ^  There  is  a  touch,  a  shadow,  of 
something  Dantesque  in  this  strength  of  local  antipathy,  quite  out 
of  keeping  with  the  breadth  of  sympathy  and  interest  he  shows 
elsewhere.  The  much- travelled  Greek  never  entirely  lost  the  narrow 
partisanship  of  his  home  town.  To  be  sure,  as  commentators  have 
pointed  out,  such  anti-Ionian  sentiments  were  popular  at  Athens,^ 
which  was  having  its  troubles  keeping  the  lonians  in  subjection, 
in  the  days  when  Herodotus  sought  its  hospitahty ;  but,  although 
the  applause  of  his  audience  ^  may  have  led  him  to  polish  his  darts, 
he  flicked  them  of  his  own  accord.  The  Halicarnassus  of  his  boy- 
hood seems  to  have  left  its  traces  in  his  outlook,  whatever  else  it 
supplied.^ 

It  is  unfortunate  to  have  to  touch  first  upon  this  evidence  of 
smallness  in  Herodotus,  for  the  work  as  a  whole  is  marked  by  a 
breadth  of  view  in  keeping  with  its  breadth  of  knowledge.  Indeed 
it  is  doubtful  if  the  wide  scope  of  its  information  did  not  depend 
upon  the  open  mind  with  which  the  author-voyager  travelled  the 
world,  that  frank  desire  to  see  things  as  they  are,  which,  when 
disciplined,  leads  toward  science.  Just  what  disciplines  directed 
the  native  curiosity  of  Herodotus  no  one  knows,  but  they  must 
have  been  considerable.^  His  work  reveals  a  wide  and  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  poetry  of  Hellas,  especially  Homer ;  ^  and  he  had 
readily  at  hand  his  predecessors  in  the  new  art  of  prose-writing, 

1  Ibid.,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  CXLII.  Cf.  R.  W.  Macan's  comments  (Herodotus,  the  Fourth, 
Fifth,  and  Sixth  Books  (2  vols.,  1895),  Vol.  I,  Bk.  IV,  p.  98)  that  this  remark  "may- 
have  been  current  in  Sparta :  at  least  it  has  a  Doric  ring.  But  the  sneer  was 
singularly  unjust,  as  the  Ionic  revolts  proved.  What  is  not  found  in  Herodotus  is 
the  story  of  the  surrender  of  the  Asiatic  Dorians  to  the  Persian." 

2  Cf.  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  pp.  61-62. 
'  Cf.  Thucydides'  comment  on  him,  infra,  p.  163. 

*  The  best  discussion  of  Herodotus'  attitude  toward  Ionia  is  by  R.  W.  Macan, 
Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth,  arid  Sixth  Books,  Introduction,  Vol.  I,  pp.  Ixvii  sq. 

6  George  Rawlinson,  in  the  introduction  to  his  translation  of  Herodotus,  has 
perhaps  the  best  survey  of  the  subject  as  a  whole. 

6  "He  has  drunk  at  the  Homeric  cistern  until  his  whole  being  is  impregnated  with 
the  influence  thence  derived.  In  the  scheme  and  plan  of  his  work,  in  the  arrangement 
and  order  of  its  parts,  in  the  tone  and  character  of  the  thoughts,  in  ten  thousand  little 
expressions  and  words,  the  Homeric  student  appears ;  and  it  is  manifest  that  the  two 
great  poems  of  ancient  Greece  are  at  least  as  familiar  to  him  as  Shakspeare  to  the 
modern  educated  Englishman."  G.  Rawlinson,  The  History  of  Herodotus  (2d  ed.). 
Vol.  I,  p.  6.     In  addition,  Rawlinson  cites  references  to  some  fifteen  poets. 


146    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

especially  Hecataeus,  to  cite  or  refer  to  on  occasion.  His  ^educa- 
tion, therefore,  must  have  been  almost  as  extensive  as  his  travels, 
covering  practically  the  known  world.  Only  a  well-born  and  well- 
to-do  young  man  could  equip  himself  as  he  did  for  his  Ufe-task. 
Such  a  one  could  hardly  keep  out  of  politics  in  a  Greek  city,  and 
his  travels  may  have  been  partly  due  to  exile.  But  of  this  he  gives 
no  glimpse  himself,  and  the  story  of  participation  in  a  Halicar- 
nassan  revolution,  and  subsequent  withdrawal  to  Ionian  Samos, 
rests  only  on  a  late  source.^  Practically  all  we  know  for  certain  is 
that  about  447  b.c,  near  the  age  of  forty,  he  went  to  Athens  to 
reside,  and  to  form  part  of  that  most  brilliant  circle  of  men  of  genius 
which  the  world  has  ever  seen,  at  the  "court"  of  Pericles ;  that  he 
left  Athens  four  years  later  (443)  to  become  a  citizen  of  the  Athenian 
colony  of  Thurii  in  Italy,  where  he  died,  apparently  shortly  after 
430  B.C.  Into  this  framework  were  fitted  many  travels  and  the 
arduous  labor  of  a  great  composition.  Just  how  they  fitted,  careful 
study  of  the  text  can  largely  show,  but  such  intensive  criticism  is 
no  part  of  this  survey.  The  striking  thing  is  the  extent  of  the 
travels,  from  upper  Egypt  in  the  south,  to  "Scythia"  in  the  far 
north,  from  Magna  Graecia  in  the  western  Mediterranean  to  Babylon 
in  the  Orient,  and  almost  all  the  world  between ;  the  dates  matter 
less. 

Turning  from  the  biography  of  Herodotus  to  his  history  is  like 
turning  from  a  single  article  in  an  encyclopaedia  to  the  encyclopaedia 
as  a  whole.  The  first  thing  that  strikes  one  on  opening  it,  is  it£ 
vastness,  its  intricacy,  the  wealth  of  its  information.  Such  a  work 
is  too  large,  in  every  sense  of  the  word,  to  be  compressed  within 
the  few  pages  of  this  outhne.  With  it  before  us,  we  have  at  last 
entered  upon  the  broad  fines  of  the  genuine  history  of  History,  and 
we  may  stand  aside,  as  it  were,  to  let  the  Herodotean  achievement 
speak  for  itself.  The  usefulness  of  a  guide  depends  not  less  upon 
maintaining  discreet  silences  in  the  presence  of  monuments  uni- 
versally known,  than  in  bringing  the  traveller  face  to  face  with 
them.  Such  comments  as  follow,  therefore,  are  not  intended  as 
contributions  to  scholarship,  but  as  suggestions,  mostly  famifiar 
to  students,  for  reading  the  text  itself  in  the  fight  of  this  study  as  a 

^  Suidas,  the  Byzantine  scholar  of  the  early  Middle  Ages,  whose  lexicon  preserved 
many  valuable  items  of  classical  information. 


HERODOTUS  147 

whole,  not  leaving  it  either  entirely  unexplained  nor  yet  permit- 
ting it  to  be  entirely  submerged  beneath  the  rising  tide  of  expert 
criticism. 

The  first  impression  of  the  History  is  one  of  relative  formless- 
ness ;  the  rambhng  story  of  a  good  raconteur.  The  opening  sec- 
tions carry  back  the  conflict  between  East  and  West  to  the  dawn 
of  history,  or  rather  beyond  it,  to  the  rape  of  Helen  by  the  Asiatics 
and  of  Europa  and  Medea  by  the  Greeks,  with  all  their  conse- 
quences. The  stage  is  thus  set  for  the  drama,  and  were  Herodotus 
a  dramatist,  he  would  have  at  once  brought  on  the  main  actors  and 
reduced  the  outlying  portions  of  his  subject  to  mere  incidents,  as 
Thucydides  did.  But  Herodotus  was  not  a  dramatist.  Although, 
influenced  perhaps  by  ^schylus,  he  depicted  the  overthrow  of 
the  Persians  as  the  result  of  divine  judgment,  and  so  secured  for 
his  work  an  underlying  dramatic  unity,  he  handled  his  material 
like  a  romancer,  with  careless  art  passing  from  story  to  story  and 
land  to  land.  One  subject  seems  to  suggest  another,  and  with 
hardly  a  casual  "that  reminds  me"  the  story-teller  seems  to  plunge 
into  each  new  narrative,  rich  with  description  of  unknown  lands 
and  the  fabulous  tales  of  distant  centuries.  The  mention  of  the 
attack  of  Croesus,  King  of  Lydia,  upon  the  Greek  cities  of  Asia 
Minor  leads  to  a  general  survey  of  the  history  of  Lydia  and  of  its 
Greek  neighbors.  The  conquest  of  Croesus  by  Cyrus,  which  follows, 
opens  up  the  great  Persian  Empire,  and  we  pass  to  Egypt,  Babylon 
and  Scythia  in  a  rambling  survey  of  that  great  "barbarian"  world. 
Then  the  narrative  settles  down  to  the  struggle  between  Persians 
and  Greeks.  Passages  dealing  with  the  Greeks  in  the  earlier  por- 
tion are  now  linked  up  with  the  revolt  of  the  Ionian  cities  against 
Darius,  and  by  way  of  the  anger  of  the  great  king  we  are  led  to 
Marathon,  and  then  to  Salamis  and  more  recent  times.  As  we 
approach  this  central  theme,  the  digressions  drop  away,  the  style 
becomes  more  direct,  and  the  author  marshals  his  motley  array  of 
materials  somewhat  as  Xerxes  did  his  army  when  it  passed  before 
him  in  that  vast,  bewildering  review. 

Such  is  the  first  impression  one  receives  of  the  work  as  a  whole, 
but  closer  reading  shows  that  it  is  by  no  means  so  loosely  knit  as 
it  appears.  On  the  contrary,  it  bears  evidence  of  careful  editing, 
and  fits  with  little  strain  into  a  general  architectural  plan,  which 


148    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

modern  scholars  have  had  little  difficulty  in  agreeing  upon.  Al- 
though the  division  of  the  work  into  nine  books  seems  clearly  to 
have  been  done  by  a  later  hand,  probably,  as  indicated  above,^ 
to  meet  the  exigencies  of  the  libraries  where  scholars  of  the  Hellen- 
istic period  consulted  it,  yet  the  editor  did  his  work  so  well  that 
no  one  has  attempted  to  improve  upon  it.  But  the  assignment  oi 
the  text  to  these  accepted  "books"  has  not  prevented  modern 
scholars  from  attempting  to  find  "broader,  more  fundamental 
and  primary"  divisions. ^  The  conclusions  of  the  greatest  textual 
critic  of  today,  based  on  a  most  elaborate  analysis  and  reduced  to 
simple  statement  by  the  historian  of  Greek  historians  are  as  follows :  ^ 
"The  work  falls  naturally  into  three  sections,  each  consisting 
of  three  parts.  The  first  section,  or  triad  of  Books,  comprises  the 
reigns  of  Cyrus  and  Cambyses,  and  the  accession  of  Darius;  the 
second  deals  with  the  reign  of  Darius ;  the  third  with  that  of 
Xerxes.  The  first  is  mainly  concerned  with  Asia  including  Egypt , 
the  second  with  Europe ;  the  third  with  Hellas.  The  first  displays 
the  rise  and  the  triumphs  of  the  power  of  Persia ;  the  last  relates 
the  defeat  of  Persia  by  Greece ;  while  the  middle  triad  represents 
a  chequered  picture,  Persian  failure  in  Scythia  and  at  Marathon, 
Greek  failure  in  Ionia.  And  each  of  the  nine  subdivisions  has  a 
leading  theme  which  constitutes  a  minor  unity.  Cyrus  is  the  theme 
of  the  first  Book,  Egypt  of  the  second,  Scythia  of  the  fourth,  the 
Ionian  rebellion  of  the  fifth,  Marathon  of  the  sixth.  The  seventh 
describes  the  invasion  of  Xerxes  up  to  his  success  at  Thermopylae ; 
the  eighth  relates  to  the  reversal  of  fortune  at  Salamis;  the  final 
triumphs  of  Greece  at  Plataea  and  Mycale  occupy  the  ninth.  In 
the  third  alone  the  unity  is  less  marked ;  yet  there  is  a  central 
interest  in  the  dynastic  revolution  which  set  Darius  on  the  throne. 
Thus  the  unity  of  the  whole  composition  sharply  displays  itself 
in  three  parts,  of  which  each  again  is  threefold.*  The  simplicity 
with  which  this  architectural  symmetry  has  been  managed,  with- 

'  Cf.  supra,  Chap.  III.  R.  W.  Macan,  Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth,  and  Sixth  Books, 
Introduction,  Vol.  I,  p.  x. 

^  R.  W.  Macan,  Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth,  and  Sixth  Books,  Introduction, 
Vol.  I,  pp.  xi  sq. 

'  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  pp.  38,  39,  based  upon  Macan's  analysis, 
though  supplying  independent  criteria. 

*  This  has  been  developed  by  Macan. 


HERODOTUS  149 

out  any  apparent  violence,  constraint,  or  formality,  was  an  achieve- 
ment of  consummate  craft." 

It  may  be  wrong,  but  as  one  turns  from  this  schematic  arrange- 
ment to  the  narrative  itself,  an  unbidden  doubt  arises  to  question 
if  the  "architectural  unity"  of  the  great  work  is  quite  as  simple 
as  the  analysis  seems  to  imply.  As  Macan  himself  confesses,^  the 
fourth  book  is  like  the  first  three  in  the  quality  which  links  them 
all,  that  encyclopaedic  survey  by  way  of  vast  digressions,  which 
carries  the  narrative  far  away  from  the  central  theme.  The  fourth 
book  swings  off  to  the  outer  confines  of  the  barbarian  world,  and 
matches  with  its  brilliant  sketches  of  Scythia  and  Libya  the  wonder- 
ful second  book  on  Egypt.  We  leave  Darius  by  Bosphorus  or 
Danube  to  study  the  climate,  fauna  and  flora  of  the  cold  northern 
plains,  wander  like  the  Greek  traders  (whose  accounts  are  woven 
into  the  texture  of  the  history)  along  far  rivers  through  unknown 
peoples,  trace  the  amber  trail  to  dimmer  distances,  and,  almost 
incidentally,  note  the  habits  and  customs  of  men,  until  the  Scythian 
logos  becomes  a  priceless  treasure  of  anthropological  lore.  This 
is  surely  in  the  style  of  the  first  three  books. 

The  change  from  the  far-reaching  discursive  style  to  the  nar- 
rower treatment  of  events  in  the  later  books  is  a  gradual  one ; 
for  there  are  digressions  right  up  to  the  battle  of  Thermopylae,  but 
as  the  Greeks  themselves  come  more  and  more  into  the  story  there 
is  naturally  less  description  and  more  straight  narrative.  There 
was  no  need  to  describe  the  Greeks  to  themselves,  except  as  the 
facts  were  not  well  known  at  Athens.  The  turning  point  in  the 
history,  therefore,  inasmuch  as  one  can  detect  it,  seems  to  be  when 
Athens  itself  is  brought  upon  the  scene,  the  Athens  they  all  knew. 
This  comes  in  the  fifth  book,  when,  through  the  great  Athenian 
revolution,  we  are  brought  out  of  the  "old  regime"  to  the  modern 
days  of  the  new  democracy.  All  before  was  ancient  history ;  the 
overthrow  of  the  tyrants  marked,  fittingly,  the  coming  of  modern 
times,  and  from  now  on  Herodotus  could  be  a  modern  historian. 
It  is  hard  at  this  distance  to  recover  the  perspectives  of  the  fifth 
century  B.C.,  and  to  realize  that  the  Athens  and  Sparta  which  had 
figured  in  the  earlier  books  were  already,  to  the  hsteners  of  Herod- 

>  Cf.  R.  W.  Macan,  Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth,  and  Sixth  Books,  Introduction, 
Vol.  I,  pp.  xxii-xxiv. 


ISO    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

otus,  about  as  far  away  in  time  as  the  kingdom  of  Lydia  in  space. 
It  takes  but  a  short  time  for  unhistorical  peoples  to  lose  their  sense 
of  the  reality  of  events;  and  Solon  and  Croesus  were  both  alike, 
the  half-historical,  half-mythical  figures  of  a  bygone  era.  With 
Miltiades  and  Darius  the  case  was  different.  Though  they  too 
already  were  passing  into  the  heroic  past,  men  who  had  fought 
Darius  were  still  alive,  and  these  old  veterans  sprinkled  in  the 
audience  would  hardly  encourage  that  discursive  anecdotal  type 
of  narrative  which  was  suitable  for  the  ancient  history  and  for  the 
geography  of  the  earlier  part. 

The  fifth  book,  therefore,  in  which  the  "revolution"  is  described, 
may  be  regarded  as  furnishing  the  transition  from  the  "ancient" 
to  the  "modern"  history  of  Herodotus.  The  point  is  rather  ob- 
scured by  the  persistence  of  downright  mediaeval  conditions  at 
Sparta,  which  had  yet  to  be  described,^  and,  although  recent,  seem 
to  be  on  a  par  with  the  remoter  days  of  the  tyranny  at  Athens. 
But  everything  is  shaping  up  for  the  dramatic  act  with  which  the 
book  closes,  the  Ionian  revolt,  which  brought  the  Great  War  to 
Greece,  henceforth  the  one  dominant  theme  of  the  history.  The 
new  keynote  is  struck  by  the  comment  with  which  Herodotus  closes 
the  account  of  the  Athenian  revolution:  "And  it  is  plain  enough, 
not  from  this  instance  only,  but  from  many  everywhere,  that 
freedom  is  an  excellent  thing,  since  even  the  Athenians,  who,  while 
they  continued  under  the  rule  of  tyrants,  were  not  a  whit  more 
valiant  than  any  of  their  neighbours,  no  sooner  shook  off  the  yoke 
than  they  became  decidedly  the  first  of  all.  These  things  show  that, 
while  undergoing  oppression,  they  let  themselves  be  beaten,  since 
then  they  worked  for  a  master ;  but  so  soon  as  they  got  their  freedom, 
each  man  was  eager  to  do  the  best  he  could  for  himself.  So  fared 
it  now  with  the  Athenians."  ^  The  path  from  this  to  Salamis  was 
thus  definitely  entered  upon,  but  it  was  still  a  long  one  with  many 
turnings. 

Whichever  way  one  views  the  "architectural  plan"  of  Herod- 
otus' history,  whether  as  a  tri-partite  grouping  or  a  less  formal 
but  more  intrinsic  unity,  the  plan  was  apparently  not  thought 
out  beforehand,  but  grew  with  the  history  itself.     For  internal 

iC/.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  V,  Chaps.  XXXIX-XLVIH, 
2  Ibid.,  Bk.  V,  Chap.  LXXVIH. 


HERODOTUS  151 

evidence  shows  that  the  first  books  to  be  written  were  the  last 
three,  and  they  were  apparently  already  largely  written  by  the 
time  he  went  to  Athens.^  His  travels,  —  that  is,  the  real  expedi- 
tions to  the  outlying  world,  —  came  later.  It  was  a  triumph  of 
art  to  master  the  bewildering  miscellany  which  these  later  years 
revealed  and  weave  it  into  a  single  texture,  so  that  the  original 
story  of  Xerxes'  invasion,  with  which  he  came  to  Athens,  was  left 
after  all  as  the  fitting  climax  to  the  whole. 

If  the  simplicity  and  perfection  of  plan  were  a  product  of  art 
and  not,  as  might  seem,  the  result  produced  by  the  very  nature 
of  the  circumstances  recorded,  the  same  is  true  of  the  style.  The 
very  artlessness  of  Herodotus  is  artful.  He  is  garrulous  to  a  point 
and  sophistically  ingenuous.  When  unable  either  to  confirm  or 
deny  the  truth  of  what  he  tells,  he  brings  his  sources  frankly  into 
the  narrative  and  leaves  them  there.  Sometimes,  often  in  fact,  he 
seems  to  apologize  for  them,  as  in  a  passage  in  the  seventh  book, 
where  he  says,  "  My  duty  is  to  report  all  that  is  said ;  but  I  am 
not  obliged  to  believe  it  all  alike  —  a  remark  which  may  be  under- 
stood to  apply  to  my  whole  History."  ^  So  he  letS"  his  characters  talk  ; 
and  how  they  talk  !  Often  he  seems  to  stand  by  and  chuckle.  Once 
in  a  while  he  interjects  a  dry  remark,  —  as,  when  reporting  a  story 
that  a  certain  Scyllias  swam  several  miles  under  water,  he  adds,  ''My 
own  opinion  is  that  ...  he  made  the  passage  ...  in  a  boat"  !^ 
Similarly,  he  often  escapes  committing  himself,  as  on  the  question  of 
the  sources  of  the  Nile,  with  regard  to  which  he  had  found  no  one 
among  all  those  with  whom  he  conversed  who  professed  to  have  any 
knowledge  except  a  single  person.  "  He  was  the  scribe  who  kept  the 
register  of  the  sacred  treasures  of  Minerva  in  the  City  of  Sais,  and  he 
did  not  seem  to  me  to  be  in  earnest  when  he  said  that  he  knew  them 
perfectly  well."  '*  Herodotus  wishes  us  to  know  that  he  could  travel 
and  listen  with  his  tongue  in  his  cheek;   yet  deftly,  at  the  same 

1  For  a  full  treatment  of  practically  all  detailed  problems  concerning  Herodotus' 
history,  see  the  edition  by  R.  W.  Macan,  with  its  introductions,  notes  and  appen- 
dices. On  thispo'mtseeHerodohts,  the  Seventh,  Eighth,  and  Ninth  Books  {2  vols.,  1908), 
Introduction,  Vol.  I,  pp.  xlv-.xlvii.   Cf.  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  p.  39. 

2  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  VII,  Chap.  CLII.  It  should  be  noted  that  this 
comment  dealt  with  a  controversial  matter  of  so  recent  date  that  it  has  a  more  de- 
fensive ring  than  the  earlier  ones. 

3  Ibid.,  Bk.  VIII,  Chap.  VIII.  *  Ibid.,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XXVIII. 


152    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

time,  by  his  deference  to  our  criticism,  and  the  frankness  of  his 
confessions  to  us,  he  leaves  an  impression  of  simple  candor  that  adds 
to  the  charm  of  the  telling. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  how  much  of  Herodotus'  history  is  a 
collection  of  what  other  people  said.  Even  his  moralizing  is  partly 
due  to  what  he  got  from  his  informants.^  It  is  a  vast  mass  of  ma- 
terial, drawn  from  priests  and  travellers,  from  tradition  and  docu- 
ments, from  stories  of  eye-witnesses  and  personal  observation,  all 
arranged  and  fitted  to  a  single  plan,  but  not  worked  over  so  as  to 
obliterate  the  nature  of  the  originals.  This,  to  the  modern  student, 
is  not  its  least  merit.  However  biassed  and  pro-Athenian  Herodotus 
was,  however  guides  imposed  upon  his  ignorance  or  sources  misled 
him,  he  left  us  largely  the  means  for  passing  judgment  upon  him- 
self. And  this  very  fact  does  much  to  bring  the  verdict  of  even 
this  critical,  scientific  age  in  his  favor. 

It  was  serious  work.  Long  years  of  travel  were  behind  the 
story,  and  the  author,  with  proud  simplicity,  proclaimed  himself 
a  savant  in  the  opening  line.  His  narrative  "is  the  showing  forth 
of  researches  [histories] "  by  one  who  is  able  to  make  them :  the 
term  history  is  here  used  in  the  definite  technical  sense.  His 
predecessors  were  "makers  of  prose,"  but  he  is  a  "historian." 
Modern  criticism  denies  him  the  distinction  in  just  the  way  he 
claimed  it,^  but  it  awards  him  still  the  distinction  which  he  was 
awarded  in  antiquity,  of  being  at  once  a  pioneer  and  a  classic,  — 
the  Father  of  History.  He  combined  with  the  instincts  of  critical 
investigation  the  consummate  skill  of  a  great  artist.  When  his 
work  is  compared  with  the  histories  written  before  his  day,  its 
epoch-making  quality  is  at  once  apparent.  There  is  not  only  the 
deft,  elusive  touch  of  a  master  in  the  massing  of  detail,  but  the 
narrative  never  loses  its  elan,  however  burdened  with  the  weight 
of  fact.     It  swings  along  with  the  strength  and  grace  of  a  mind 

1  Cf.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XXVni. 

2  The  attack  of  A.  H.  Sayce  in  his  Ancient  Empires  of  the  East,  referred  to  above, 
casting  doubt  upon  the  veracity  of  Herodotus,  was  perhaps  the  severest  criticism 
which  the  Father  of  History  has  had  to  face.  Subsequent  studies  have  refuted  at 
least  the  implications  of  most  of  the  points  alleged.  See  the  judgment  of  A.  and  M. 
Croiset,  Histoire  de  la  litterature  grecque  (2d  ed.),  Vol.  II,  pp.  565  sqq.,  where 
Herodotus  is  treated  in  connection  with  a  most  illuminating  survey  of  Greek  historiog- 
raphy. 


HERODOTUS  153 

unfettered  by  either  the  hampering  taboos  of  the  primitive  or  the 
theories  and  questionings  of  too  philosophic  culture.  A  tinge  of 
romance  from  the  golden  age  still  lightens  the  sober  path  of  real 
events.  One  must  turn  to  the  text  itself  to  appreciate  it;  com- 
mentaries are  as  inadequate  as  they  are  plentiful. 

There  are  one  or  two  further  points,  however,  which  are  more 
especially  pertinent  to  this  survey.  In  the  first  place,  we  must 
revert  to  the  point  referred  to  above,  —  the  modernity  of  Herodotus. 
Nothing  is  more  difficult  in  the  appreciation  of  history  than  its 
perspective,  and  in  judging  the  achievement  of  the  first  historian 
we  are  almost  sure  to  find,  first  of  all,  our  own  limitations.  Through 
the  long  stretch  of  the  intervening  centuries,  Midas,  Solon,  Croesus, 
Cyrus,  Darius,  and  Xerxes  all  seem  to  belong  to  one  and  the  same 
time.  They  are  all  "ancients";  and  the  short  intervals  which 
lie  between  them  do  not  seem  of  much  importance.  Only 
Egypt  reaches  out  from  what  seems  to  us  a  common  age  into  a 
different  horizon,^  like  the  sombre  suggestion  of  the  mystery  which 
lies  beyond  the  beginning  of  the  things  one  knows.  But  to  Herodotus 
and  his  audience  the  perspective  was  entirely  different.  It  would 
be  as  though  some  one  of  this  generation,  writing  of  the  Franco- 
Prussian  war,  were  to  carry  back  the  narrative  of  causes  through 
the  long  centuries  of  the  national  development  of  Europe  in  order 
to  treat  adequately  the  questions  of  today.  Herodotus  had  met 
and  talked  with  those  who  lived  through  these  stirring  times ; 
the  scars  of  war  were  in  a  sense  still  there ;  the  effects  upon  the  for- 
tunes of  Greece,  and  especially  of  Athens,  were  just  showing  them- 
selves to  the  full.  He  built  his  vast  and  labyrinthine  structure 
around  this  main  theme  of  the  world-conflict ;  and  since  it  was  a 
world-conflict,  he  brought  to  bear  upon  it  the  history  of  the  world. 
The  treatment  varies  with  the  sources.  The  events  at  home  were 
known  —  or  at  least  might  be  known  —  to  his  audience  before- 
hand. There  he  must  be  on  his  guard.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
accounts  of  Egyptians  and  Orientals  are  picked  up  at  second- 
hand :  Herodotus  marks  them  off  from  the  rest  of  his  narrative ; 
they  are  the  logoi,  —  the  tales  of  the  different  countries,  the  extras 
in  his  narrative,  "histories"  by  themselves.  They  are  drawn  from 
all  kinds  of  sources,  from  native  priests  and  dragomans  and  travel- 

'  As  for  the  legends  of  Babylon,  they  bear  on  the  surface  the  marks  of  legend. 


154    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

lers  before  his  day  —  Hecataeus  especially.  It  is  easy  to  see  why 
this  part  is  so  much  less  reliable  than  the  other.  The  priests  of 
Egypt  might  mislead  him  or  he  misunderstand  them;  but  in  the 
Grecian  part  he  knew  where  he  was  going.  As  a  matter  of  fact 
he  did  make  the  mistakes  of  a  traveller.  For  a  glaring  instance, 
he  puts  down  Nebuchadnezzar  of  Babylon  as  a  woman,  —  Queen 
Nitocris.  But  we  must  recall,  as  Macaulay  reminds  us,  that 
Babylon  was  to  Greece  about  what  Pekin  was  to  the  Europe  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  The  remarkable  thing  is  that  Herodotus 
got  as  much  correct  as  he  did.  When  one  thinks  of  what  tales 
European  tourists  are  fed  on  today,  what  myths  are  current  in 
this  country  about  the  character  of  foreign  peoples,  even  what  per- 
sistent misunderstanding  there  is  between  different  sections  of 
the  same  country,  where  intercourse  is  so  general  and  so  constant 
one  begins  to  see  the  canny  temper  of  the  Father  of  History. 

It  is  hard  to  get  a  true  sense  of  the  Herodotean  achievement  in 
terms  of  any  modern  parallel.  That  of  a  European  historian  of 
today  writing  of  the  Franco-Prussian  war  is  obviously  entirely 
inadequate.  Perhaps  it  might  spur  the  historical  imagination  if 
we  were  to  suppose  that  our  Persians  are  Russians  and  our  Greeks 
Japanese,  and  that  some  twenty  or  thirty  years  from  now  an 
Oriental  historian  sets  to  work  to  immortalize  the  war  which  broke 
the  island  barriers  of  Japan  and  started  it  on  its  imperial  career  of 
expansion.  Port  Arthur  is  Thermopylae,  Mukden  is  Marathon, 
and  Tsushima,  Salamis.  The  Oriental  Herodotus  travels  through 
the  West  to  gather  the  materials  for  a  history  of  the  two  worlds  in 
conflict.  So,  in  place  of  that  ancient  royal  road  of  Persia,  he  takes 
the  Trans-Siberian  railway  to  the  ancient  West  and  wanders  through 
Europe,  in  search  of  truth  —  a  genuine  laropecov.  He  asks  the 
professors  of  Oxford  for  light  on  history  and  theology.  He  listens 
to  talk  in  the  clubs  and  hotels,  and,  with  little  to  fall  back  upon 
but  his  Oriental  common  sense,  and  a  few  guide  books  in  Japanese, 
tries  to  work  out  a  reliable  account  of  peoples  whose  language  he 
cannot  read  or  speak,  and  among  whom  he  lived  only  as  a  traveUing 
guest.  His  history  of  Europe  might  begin  with  an  account  of  a 
Magellan,  in  search  of  golden  fleeces  in  the  eastern  seas,  or  Marco 
Polo  visiting  the  great  Khan.  Beyond  Marco  Polo,  the  first 
historical  figure  in  the  annals  of  Europe,  would  lie  the  incredible 


HERODOTUS  155 

stoty  of  Rome  and  Greece,  and  perhaps  there  would  be  a  passage 
from  Herodotus  himself.  Beyond  this  are  the  blank  prehistoric 
ages,  stretching  back,  according  to  Oxford  anthropologists,  to  a 
fabulous  ice  flood,  much  farther  than  the  432,000  years  which  the 
priests  allotted  to  ancient  Babylon.  Suppose  that  here  and  there 
he  confused  these  data  of  science  with  the  accounts  of  theologians 
who  believed  in  the  literal  inspiration  of  Genesis.  He  might,  per- 
haps, suspect  and  suggest  that  the  material  hardly  fitted  the  con- 
text, but  the  theologians  were  admirable  men,  with  a  high  sense  of 
morals,  so  down  it  would  go,  with  a  short  note  on  the  character  of 
the  informants.  As  the  story  drifted  on  toward  modern  times,  it 
would  grow  more  complicated,  for  in  a  single  lifetime  Japan  passed 
from  feudal  society,  fighting  in  armor,  to  a  nation  armed  with  siege 
cannon  and  dreadnoughts.  Of  the  age  of  transition,  when  the 
Phoenician  Britishers  played  their  role,  our  Herodotus  could  gather 
personal  reminiscences  and  local  memoirs,  —  of  varying  reliability. 
But  when  he  finally  reaches  the  struggle  in  Manchuria,  he  has  been 
over  the  ground  of  Mukden  himself,  and  recalls,  from  his  youth, 
the  effects  of  the  war.  Here  he  knows  his  time  and  people,  for 
they  are  his  own. 

The  comparison  might  be  developed  farther.  But  if  we  have 
to  invent  our  modern  Herodotus  in  order  to  appreciate  the  ancient 
one,  it  is  better  to  delay  until  our  impressions  of  the  original  are 
refreshed  by  a  new  study  of  the  first  single  masterpiece  in  the  his- 
tory of  History.  To  do  so  one  must  turn  to  the  book  itself,  for  no 
series  of  extracts  can  do  it  justice.  One  instance  of  his  scientific 
method  is  perhaps  worth  quoting  in  full  for  another  reason. 

In  an  earlier  chapter  we  ventured  the  regret  that  Herodotus  had 
not  visited  Jerusalem  about  the  time  the  Pentateuch  was  being 
edited  for  the  Bible  as  we  have  it.^  It  may  be  of  interest  to  see  how 
near  he  was  to  Jerusalem.  He  had  become  attracted  by  the  problem 
of  tracing  the  myth  of  Heracles  throughout  non-Greek  parallels 
and  tells  us  how,  with  curiosity  quickened  rather  than  subdued  by 
what  he  found  in  Egypt, ^  he  pursued  his  investigations  to  that 
borderland  of  Palestine,  Phoenicia.  A  visit  inland  to  the  Jewish 
scholars  would  not  have  thrown  much  Hght  on  Heracles,  for  of  the 

^  Chap.  VIII  supra,  ad  fin. 

2  Cf.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  II,  Chaps.  XLIII-XLV. 


156    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Heraclean  labors  of  Gilgamesh,  the  story  of  Noah  retains  no  trace. ^ 
But  there  might  have  been  significant  comments  on  other  matters ! 
The  researches  in  Phoenicia  are  recorded  as  follows : 

"  In  the  wish  to  get  the  best  information  that  I  could  on  these  matters,  I 
made  a  voyage  to  Tyre  in  Phoenicia,  hearing  there  was  a  temple  of  Hercules 
at  that  place,  very  highly  venerated.  I  visited  the  temple,  and  found  it  richly 
adorned  with  a  number  of  offerings,  among  which  were  two  pillars,  one  of  pure 
gold,  the  other  of  emerald,  shining  with  great  brilUancy  at  night.  In  a  con- 
versation which  I  held  with  the  priests,  I  inquired  how  long  their  temple  had 
been  built,  and  found  by  their  answer  that  they  too  differed  from  the  Greeks. 
They  said  that  the  temple  was  built  at  the  same  time  that  the  city  was  founded, 
and  that  the  foundation  of  the  city  took  place  two  thousand  three  hundred 
years  ago.  In  Tyre  I  remarked  another  temple  where  the  same  god  was  wor- 
shipped as  the  Thasian  Hercules.  So  I  went  on  to  Thasos,  where  I  found  a 
temple  of  Hercules  which  had  been  built  by  the  Phoenicians  who  colonized 
that  island  when  they  sailed  in  search  of  Europa.  Even  this  was  five  genera- 
tions earlier  than  the  time  when  Hercules,  son  of  Amphitryon,  was  born  in 
Greece.  These  researches  show  plainly  that  there  is  an  ancient  god  Hercules ; 
and  my  own  opinion  is,  that  those  Greeks  act  most  wisely  who  build  and 
maintain  two  temples  of  Hercules,  in  the  one  of  which  the  Hercules  worshipped 
is  known  by  the  name  of  Olympian,  and  has  sacrifice  offered  to  him  as  an  im- 
mortal, while  in  the  other  the  honours  paid  are  such  as  are  due  to  a  hero."  ^ 

There  is  no  need  to  appraise  the  work  of  Herodotus ;  history 
has  already  done  that  for  us.  Until  the  monuments  were  deciphered 
his  account  was  about  all  we  had  of  some  of  the  greatest  empires  of 
the  ancient  world,  and  it  still  remains  a  constant  commentary  on 
them.  One  might  even  say  that  until  our  own  time  it  has  been 
for  antique  history  as  a  whole  almost  what  Homer  was  to  the  Greek 
of  Athens.  But  if  appraisal  of  his  achievement  is  gratuitous,  it 
may  be  well  in  closing  to  recall  that  the  achievement  involved  the 
two  aspects  of  historiography,  —  criticism,  which  lies  in  the  field 
of  science,  and  narrative,  which  is  mainly  art,  and  that  while  the 
latter  quality  has  been  chiefly  of  value  in  the  long  centuries  of  the 
unscientific  mind,  preserving  the  story  by  the  very  magic  of  its 
appeal,  yet  today  it  is  the  other  aspect  which  is  of  most  importance ; 
for  it  has  now  to  pass  a  much  more  critical  audience  than  ever 
assembled  in  Athens,  and  one  that  knows  more  of  Greece  than  they, 
or  of  its  antiquity  than  Herodotus. 

1  Vide  supra,  Chap.  V.  2  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XLIV. 

(Rawlinson's  translation.) 


HERODOTUS 


157 


It  follows,  that  only  those  conversant  with  this  vast  new  lore 
of  classical  and  Oriental  archaeology  are  qualified  to  speak  authori- 
tatively on  the  critical  capacity  and  the  reliability  of  Herodotus. 
But,  while  leaving  detailed  criticism  for  textual  students,  we  may 
at  least  register  the  fact  that  their  verdict  is  growingly  in  his  favor. 
For  the  case  of  the  writings  of  Herodotus  is  somewhat  parallel  with 
that  of  the  records  of  the  Jews.  So  long  as  they  were  taken  for 
more  than  they  could  possibly  be,  they  were  open  to  most  serious 
charges  of  anachronisms,  exaggerations  and  the  like.  But  when  a 
truer  historical  perspective  enables  us  to  appreciate  the  necessary 
limitations,  in  both  the  implements  and  the  sources  of  research, 
of  all  antique  historians,  we  obtain  a  juster  estimate  of  their  per- 
formance because  we  do  not  expect  too  much.  So  it  was  with 
Herodotus.  When  the  data  of  history  from  the  inscriptions 
began  to  run  counter  to  some  of  his  accounts  there  was  a 
movement  of  distrust  in  them,^  but  it  has  apparently  subsided, 
and  we  have  more  discriminating  judgments,  based  on  less 
expectations. 

It  was  obviously  impossible  for  Herodotus  to  write  history  as 
we  do  now.  The  question  is  whether  he  used  his  methods  success- 
fully. There  was  one  stern  critic  of  his  time,  Thucydides,  who 
clearly  thought  that  he  attempted  too  much.  Thucydides  would 
likely  have  held  the  story  down  to  the  original  last  three  books,  and 
polished  them  over  and  over  (as  indeed  Herodotus  did),  established 
every  item  in  them  indisputably,  and  left  it  at  that.  But  Herodotus 
chose  to  add  to  them  the  logoi  or  histories  which  fill  the  long  proem, 
although  he  could  not  establish  their  accuracy  with  the  precision 
which  characterized  the  events  of  his  own  time.  The  contrast 
is  significant,  and  has  been  taken  to  show  a  distinctly  less  scientific 
temper  on  the  part  of  Herodotus,  in  that  he  has  not  that  keen 
appreciation  of  the  boundary  line  which  separates  the  world  of 
fact  from  that  of  fiction.  But  is  the  line  as  firm  a  one  after  all  as 
the  purely  scientific  mind  imagines  it  ?  If  Herodotus  had  been  as 
skeptical  as  Thucydides,  he  would  have  left  out  of  his  history  some  of 
its  most  valuable  parts,  for  some  of  the  things  most  incredible  to  him 

^  Perhaps  the  strongest  statement  of  this  is  in  A.  H.  Sayce's  Ancient  Empires  of 
the  East.  See,  by  contrast,  the  judgment  summed  up  in  Bury's  Aficient  Greek  His- 
torians. 


158    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

contain  hints  of  items  established  or  made  intelligible  by  archaeology.^ 
The  most  striking  instance  is  the  comment  of  Herodotus  on  the 
story  of  the  Phoenicians  circumnavigating  Africa  at  the  behest 
of  Neco,  the  Egyptian  Pharaoh.  "On  their  return,  they  declared 
—  I  for  my  part  do  not  believe  them,  but  perhaps  others  may  — 
that  in  sailing  round  Libya  they  had  the  sun  on  their  right-hand."  ^ 
Again,  in  his  description  of  Scythia,  he  doubts  the  long  northern 
nights,  perhaps  because  of  the  exaggerated  way  the  account  reached 
him,  that  men  there  slept  half  the  year  ;^  he  refuses  to  indorse  the 
existence  of  any  "Tin  Islands"  whence  the  tin  came  which  they 
used,*  and  expressly  states  that,  with  reference  to  the  Baltic, 
"though  I  have  taken  vast  pains  I  have  never  been  able  to  get  an 
assurance  from  an  eye-witness  that  there  is  any  sea  on  the  further 
side  of  Europe."  ^  It  would  have  given  a  poorer,  and  not  a  more 
accurate  idea  of  the  world  as  known  to  the  contemporaries  of 
Herodotus,  if  all  this  varied  information  had  been  sorted  out  by  a 
too-skeptical  mind.  The  reader  who  is  not  upon  his  guard  is  con- 
stantly reminded,^  by  innuendo,  if  not  openly,  that  a  fact  was  not 
finally  established  simply  because  it  was  recorded,  —  a  reminder  too 
long  ignored,  —  and  that  the  reader  should  contribute  as  well  some 
of  the  critical  insight  he  demanded  of  the  writer.  The  sources 
Herodotus  used  have  been  analyzed  in  great  detail,^  and  the  result 
is  to  show  that  the  work  is  much  more  the  product  of  scholarly 
erudition  and  less  of  casual  hearsay  than  at  first  appears.  He  used 
documents,  such  as  the  acts  of  the  ecclesia  at  Athens,  treaties, 

^  Cf.  G.  Rawlinson's  acute  observations  along  this  line,  The  History  of  Herodotus 
(2d  ed.),  Vol.  I,  pp.  71  sq.,  and  R.  W.  Macan,  Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth  and  Sixth 
Books,  Introduction,  Vol.  I,  p.  Ixxiii. 

2  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XLII. 

3  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XXV.      '  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  CXV.  » Ibid. 

6  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  II,  Chaps.  XXVIII,  LVI-LVII,  CXXXI ;  Bk.  Ill,  Chaps.  CXV, 
CXVI ;  Bk.  IV,  Chaps.  XXV,  XXXI,  XXXII,  XXXVI,  XLH,  XCVI,  CV ;  Bk.  V, 
Chap.  X;  Bk.  VII,  Chap.  CLH. 

^  See  especially  the  conclusions  of  R.  W.  Macan,  Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth 
and  Sixth  Books,  Introduction,  Vol.  I,  pp.  Ixxiv  sqq.  One  of  the  most  interesting  prob- 
lems in  his  use  of  sources  is  in  his  account  of  Darius'  expedition  into  Scythia,  where 
he  omits  all  mention  of  the  Balkans  (Bk.  IV,  Chaps.  XC-XCIII)  apparently,  as  Macan 
surmises,  because  at  this  point  he  was  following  a  historical  and  not  a  geographical 
source,  and  it  made  no  mention  of  the  mountains.  But  this  incident  only  emphasizes 
all  the  more  the  success  with  which,  upon  the  whole,  Herodotus  welded  his  materials 
and  marshalled  the  facts. 


HERODOTUS  159 

declarations  of  war,  but  more  sparingly  than  a  modern  historian 
would,  and  seems  to  have  been  willing  to  take  them  second-hand. 
He  could  embody  genealogies,^  and  use  geographies  while  abusing 
them.^  But  there  was  one  set  of  sources  which,  however  essential, 
was  of  dubious  value :  the  oracles,  especially  those  of  Delphi. 
They  largely  furnished  the  mechanism  for  that  supernatural  element 
which  to  us  lends  an  air  of  myth  to  the  narrative,  but  they  were 
part  and  parcel  of  Greek  history  and  Herodotus  had  no  choice  but 
to  use  them.  Unfortunately  they  helped  him  to  ignore  his  own 
chief  defect,  —  an  absence  of  the  sense  of  historical  causation.  He 
sought  only  to  keep  the  motives  psychologically  true  ^  and  left 
events  to  shape  themselves  under  the  hand  of  fate,  or  by  the  chasten- 
ing justice  of  the  gods.  For  while  Herodotus  did  not,  like  the  poets 
and  his  predecessors,  follow  the  gods  to  Olympus,  and  "drew  ...  a 
very  marked  line  between  the  mythological  age  and  the  historical,"  ^ 
he  remained  throughout  a  devoutly  religious  man.  "Under  the 
sunny  gleam  of  his  rippling  narrative,  there  is  a  substratum  of  deep 
melancholy  and  of  the  awe  concerned  with  the  anger  and  envy 
of  the  gods.  King  Croesus,  whom  the  auriferous  Pactolus  made 
the  richest  of  men,  Polycrates,  tyrant  of  Samos,  or  Periander, 
despot  of  opulent  Corinth  —  their  pride  and  their  end  are  merely 
iterations  and  reverberations  of  the  stern  melody  of  human  success 
and  divine  retribution  and  the  humiliation  of  men,  exemplified 
most  signally  in  Xerxes  himself."  ^  This  belief  in  a  Providential 
scheme  of  things  offered  him  a  clue  for  tracing  the  sequence  of 
events  which  is  open  now  to  criticism.  But  history  had  to  wait 
from  the  days  of  Herodotus  to  our  own  for  anything  approaching 
a  mastery  of  causation  in  history.  And  perhaps  our  groping 
may,  before  long,  be  classed  with  such  tendency-writing  as  his. 

As  to  style,  the  varied  charm  and  genial  manner  are  still  as 
fresh  and  winning  as  ever ;  yet  one  device  which  Herodotus  took 
over  from  his  logographic  predecessors,  —  but  which,  as  we  shall 
see,  goes  back  to  the  very  origins  of  story-telling,  —  the  insertion  of 

1  Cf.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  LIII. 

2  Vide  supra,  HecatjEus. 

3  The  point  is  well  developed  by  R.  W.  Macan,  Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth  and 
Sixth  Books,  Introduction,  Vol.  I,  p.  cvi. 

*  G.  Rawlinson,  The  History  of  Herodotus  (2d  ed.),  Vol.  I,  p.  94. 
^  G.  W.  Botsford  in  Hellenic  Civilization,  p.  23. 


i6o    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

speeches  into  the  narrative,  leaves  upon  the  whole  the  tone  of  some- 
thing antique.  What  gave  an  added  air  of  reality  to  it  in  ancient 
Greece  lessens  its  force  today.  But  of  this  device  we  shall  have 
more  to  say  when  we  come  to  it  in  a  less  natural  setting  and  form 
in  the  work  of  Thucydides. 

With  Herodotus  a  new  art  may  be  said  to  have  begun,  that  of 
basing  a  genuine  epos  upon  the  search  for  truth.  How  potent  the 
touch  of  the  master  in  it  was  may  be  judged  from  the  fact  that  it 
still  remains  among  the  first  of  all  the  creations  of  history,  and 
that  it  embodied  for  subsequent  centuries  the  life  and  movement, 
thought  and  action  of  all  that  vast  antiquity  which  lay  outside  the 
Bible  and  the  other  Greek  literature.  Even  Darius  and  Xerxes 
owed  a  large  part  of  their  immortality  to  the  traveller-student  of 
Halicarnassus. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  best  edition  of  the  text  of  Herodotus  is  that  of  H.  Stein  (2  vols.,  1869- 
1871,  and  5  vols.,  4th,  5th  and  6th  ed.,  with  notes,  1893-1908).  The  last  six 
books  of  this  have  been  reprinted  by  R.  W.  Macan,  along  with  introductions, 
valuable  commentaries,  maps,  etc.,  thus  forming  the  best  edition  for  general 
use  {Herodotus,  the  Fourth,  Fifth  and  Sixth  Books,  2  vols.,  1895 ;  Herodotus, 
the  Seventh,  Eighth  and  Ninth  Books,  2  vols.,  1908).  There  are  two  principal 
English  translations.  The  History  of  Herodotus,  one  by  G.  Rawlinson  (4  vols., 
1858-1860;  2d  ed.,  1862;  3d  ed.,  1876),  with  a  wealth  of  notes,  though  anti- 
quated as  regards  archaeological  finds,  particularly  for  the  East ;  and  one  by 
G.  C.  Macaulay  (2  vols.,  1890,  new  ed.,  1904).  The  Rawlinson  translation 
has  been  used  in  the  text.  A  translation  of  Herodotus,  by  A.  D.  Godley,  is 
announced  for  the  year  1920  by  the  Loeb  Classical  Library.  For  general 
accounts  of  Herodotus  and  his  work,  see  the  histories  of  Greek  literature :  G. 
Murray,  A  History  of  Ancient  Greek  Literature  (1912),  Chap.  VI,  pp.  132-152; 
A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Histoire  de  la  litterature  grecque  (5  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1896-1899 ; 
3d  ed.,  Vols.  I-III,  1910-1914)  (2d  ed.).  Vol.  II,  Chap.  X,  pp.  565-637;  W. 
v.  Christ,  Geschichte  der  griechischen  Litteratur  (2  vols.,  5th  and  6th  ed.,  1908- 
1913),  Vol.  I,  pp.  459-476 ;  and  also  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians 
(1909),  Lect.  II,  pp.  36-74.  For  detailed  and  careful  study  a  notable  work 
is  that  of  A.  Hauvette,  Herodote,  historien  des  guerres  mediques  (1894).  See 
also  E.  Meyer,  Forschungen  zur  alten  Geschichte  (2  vols.,  1892-1899),  Vol.  I 
pp.  151-202  {Herodots  Chronologic  der  griechischen  Sagengeschichte  and  four 
supplements),  Vol.  II,  pp.  196-268  (Herodots  Geschichtswerk) ;  V.  Costanzi 
{Richcrche  su  alcuni  punti  controversi  interna  alia  vita  e  all'  opera  di  Erodoto), 
MemoricB  deV  r.  Instituto  Lomhardo,  i8gi,  pp.  181-240;  G.  Busolt,  Griechische 
Geschichte  (3  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1893-1904),  Vol.  II,  pp.  602  sqq.;  for  more  special 


HERODOTUS  i6i 

points  see  J.  L.  Myres  {Herodotus  mid  Anthropology),  in  R.  R.  Marett,  An- 
thropology and  the  Classics  (1908) ;  E.  Weber,  Herodot  als  Dichter,  in  Neue 
Jahrbucher  fiir  das  klassische  Altertum,  Vol.  XXI  (1908),  pp.  669-683 ;  W. 
Nestle,  Herodots  Verhdltnis  zur  Philosophie  und  Sophistik,  Prog.  Schonthal 
(1908) ;  H.  Matzat,  Uber  die  GlaubwUrdigkeit  der  geographischen  Angahen 
Herodots  iiber  Asien,  in  Hermes,  Vol.  VI  (1872),  pp.  392-486;  R.  Muller,  Die 
geographische  Tafel  nach  den  Angaben  Herodots  (1881) ;  A.  Bauer,  Die  Entste- 
hung  des  Herodotischen  Geschichtswerkes  (1878),  Herodots  Biographie;  eine 
Untersuchung  (1878) ;  K.  W.  Nitzsch,  Uber  Herodots  Quellen  fiir  die  Geschichte 
der  Pcrserkriege,  in  Rheinisches  Museum,  Vol.  XXVII  (1872),  pp.  226-268; 
H.  Diels,  Herodot  utid  Hekataios,  in  Hermes,  Vol.  XXII  (1887),  pp.  411-444. 
The  criticism  of  A.  H.  Sayce,  in  his  Ancient  Empires  of  the  East  (1883,  reprinted 
1900),  has  met  with  little  sympathy  among  scholars.  For  the  question,  see 
in  addition  to  A.  Hauvette,  cited  above,  Part  I ;  A.  Croiset,  Revue  des  etudes 
grecques.  Vol.  I  (188S),  pp.  154  sqq.;  R.  W.  Rogers,  History  of  Babylonia  and 
Assyria  (2  vols.,  6th  ed.,  191 5),  Vol.  I,  p.  397 ;  J.  Oppert,  in  Melanges  Henri 
Weil  (1898),  pp.  321  sqq.  For  Herodotus'  influence  on  later  philosophers  see 
J.  Geffcken,  Zwei  griechische  Apologeten  (1907),  p.  188,  n.  3.  For  his  influence 
on  Roman  historians,  see  W.  Soltau,  Die  Anfdnge  der  romischen  Geschicht- 
schreibung  (1909),  Chap.  IV,  pp.  73-91,  and  Appendix  III  {Herodot  bei  romi- 
schen Historikern) .  For  other  recent  material  on  Herodotus,  see  Jahresbericht 
uber  die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Altertumswissenschaft;  Vol.  CXVII  (1903), 
pp.  76  sqq.,  for  1 898-1 901 ;  Sup.  Vol.  CXLVI  (1909),  pp.  556  sqq.;  Vol. 
CXLVII  (1910),  pp.  I  sqq.,  for  1902-1908;  Vol.  CLXX  (1915),  pp.  291  sqq., 
for  1909-1915  ;  Vol.  CLXXI  (i9i5),pp.  ig^sqq. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
THUCYDIDES 

Alongside  the  history  of  Herodotus  stands  a  work  which  begins 
as  follows : 

''Thucydides,  an  Athenian,  wrote  the  history  of  the  war  in 
which  the  Peloponnesians  and  the  Athenians  fought  against  one 
another.  He  began  to  write  when  they  first  took  up  arms,  believ- 
ing that  it  would  be  great  and  memorable  above  any  previous 
war." 

In  such  sober  terms  does  the  greatest  historian  of  antiquity 
begin  the  story  of  those  eventful  years  which  determined  the 
fate  of  Athens,  and  with  it,  of  the  civilized  world.  This  sober- 
ness is  typical  of  the  whole  work;  a  consciousness  of  the 
high  theme  even  more.  For  the  author  was  a  different  type  of 
man  from  the  sophisticated  but  garrulous  Herodotus.  He,  too, 
had  travelled  before  his  work  was  done,  being  also  an  exile. 
But  he  did  not  become  a  citizen  of  the  world,  catching  with  easy 
familiarity  the  changeful  notes  of  different  countries.  He  remained 
throughout  a  high-born  Athenian,  a  magistrate  in  history,  severe 
and  impartial  even  when  his  dearest  interests  were  at  stake,  proud, 
isolated,  self-contained.^    There  could  not  well  be  a  greater  con- 

1  Thucydides  (c.  460  ( ?)-c.  396)  was  sprung  from  an  old  Thracian  family  on  his 
mother's  side,  though  his  father  was  an  Athenian  citizen.  We  have  no  trustworthy 
evidence  for  the  date  of  his  birth,  some  placing  it  as  early  as  471,  others  as  late  as  455  ; 
a  late  date  is  generally  accepted,  however.  His  family  was  well-off,  possessing  valuable 
mining  properties  in  Thrace.  His  early  life  was  spent  at  Athens,  where  the  influence 
of  the  sophists  upon  him  was  great.  Although  he  tells  us  that  as  soon  as  the  Pelopon- 
nesian  war  opened,  in  431,  he  kept  a  record  of  it  from  the  very  first,  he  took  no  great 
part  in  it  himself  until  424,  when  he  was  elected  one  of  the  two  generals  to  command 
an  expedition  into  Thrace.  He  was  unsuccessful,  however,  owing  to  his  failure  to 
arrive  in  time ;  and  the  incident  resulted  in  his  exile.  For  twenty  years  he  lived  on  his 
Thracian  estates,  and  returned  to  Athens  only  after  its  defeat  in  404.  His  stay  in  the 
fallen  city  was  but  for  a  short  time,  as  he  soon  returned  to  Thrace,  and  spent  the  re- 
mainder of  his  life  in  working  upon  his  history.  We  cannot  be  sure  of  the  date  of  his 
death,  but  it  seems  probable  that  it  took  place  between  399  and  396  b.c.  Tradition 
says  that  he  was  murdered ;  in  any  case  his  History  was  not  finished  at  the  time  of 

162 


THUCYDIDES  163 

trast  than  that  between  Herodotus  and  Thucydides.  Thucydides 
himself  knew  this.  He  has  a  poor  opinion  of  Herodotus,  and  as 
much  as  says  so  —  though  without  deigning  to  mention  him. 
There  is  no  mistaking  a  remark  like  this,  however:  "Men  do  not 
discriminate,  and  are  too  ready  to  receive  ancient  traditions  about 
their  own  as  well  as  about  other  countries."  ^  He  classes  with  the 
poets  those  "tales  of  chroniclers  who  seek  to  please  the  ear  rather 
than  to  speak  the  truth."  ^  His  own  ideal  is  different  —  it  is 
accuracy  and  relevancy  —  a  straight  story  and  a  true  one.  And  he 
reached  his  ideal. 

Thucydides,  too,  was  a  modern  historian,  more  so  than  He- 
rodotus. He  wrote  the  history  of  his  own  time.  As  we  have  just 
seen,  he  states  that  he  began  collecting  material  for  it  when  the 
Peloponnesian  war  began ;  so  that  it  has  not  even  the  genial 
fallacies  of  memoirs  written  late  in  life  and  blurred  over  by  failing 
memory  or  sources.  He  enjoyed  unrivalled  opportunities.  High 
in  affairs  of  state,  he  was  familiar  with  the  inner  history  of  politics 
and  knew  personally  the  leading  men.  Even  his  exile  enabled  him 
to  become  acquainted  with  the  Spartans^  and  probably  to  visit  Sicily, 
where  the  naval  power  of  Athens  met  its  fate."*  And  he  brought 
to  his  task  a  brain  that  matched  the  best  that  Greece  produced  — 
which  is  the  highest  tribute  that  can  be  paid. 

His  genius  shows  itself  at  the  very  start.  In  a  few  bold  pages  he 
cuts  his  way  through  the  mass  of  tangled  myths  and  legends  about 
the  early  history  of  Hellas,  and  presents  a  clear  and  rational  outline. 
Then,  pausing  a  moment  to  criticise  his  predecessors,  the  poets  and 
logographers  —  who  had  never  quite  done  this  thing  before  —  with 
a  proud  note  on  his  own  enterprise,  he  plunges  into  the  theme  of 
his  history. 

Here  we  have  not  the  time  to  follow  him,  and  even  if  we  had, 
we  may  as  well  confess,  with  Thucydidean  candor,  that  few  of  us 
would  care  to  do  so.  For  all  the  art  of  the  greatest  historian  of 
antiquity  cannot  quite  reconcile  the  modern  reader  —  unless  he 

his  death,  and  one  legend  has  it  that  the  eighth  book  was  completed  by  his  daughter, 
who  then  gave  the  whole  work  to  Xenophon  to  be  published. 

1  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XX.  (Jowett's 
translation.) 

^Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXI. 

3  CJ.  ibid.,  Bk.  V,  Chap.  XXVI.  "  Cf.  J.  B.  Bury,  op.  cit.,  p.  76. 


i64    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

is  a  Hellenist  beforehand  —  to  a  prolonged  study  of  the  details 
of  the  Peloponnesian  war.  For  Thucydides  it  was  the  greatest 
event  in  history.  The  Trojan  war  had  found  a  Homer ;  the  Persian 
a  Herodotus ;  but  these  two  great  epochs  of  the  Hellenic  past  were, 
in  his  eyes,  of  far  less  importance  than  that  of  the  great  civil  war 
which  involved  all  of  Greece  and  even  disturbed  the  otherwise 
negligible  barbarian  world.  The  more  he  studied  the  past  and 
compared  it  with  the  present,  the  more  he  was  convinced  that  the 
greatest  theme  in  history  was  offered  to  him  by  the  war  of  his  own 
lifetime.  So  he  preserved  its  detailed  story  with  scrupulous  care, 
and  it  is  its  very  excellence  as  history  against  which  the  modern 
reader  rebels.  For  the  war  was  long  and  had  many  turnings  ;  and 
Thucydides  is  no  garrulous  guide  or  entertainer.  He  marches 
sternly  ahead  through  a  world  of  facts ;  it  is  too  serious  business 
for  one  to  turn  aside  and  view  the  scenery ;  even  when  the  campaign 
is  over  for  the  year  and  we  return  home  to  the  city,  we  must  attend 
the  council  where  plans  for  next  year  are  on  foot.  There  is  only 
one  purpose  in  life  and  that  is  to  see  the  war  through.  The  result 
is  that  we  are  led  through  years  of  desultory  fighting,  raids,  skir- 
mishes, expeditions  by  land  and  sea,  debates  in  council,  strategy  in 
battle,  until  our  memories  are  fairly  benumbed  by  the  variety 
of  incident  and  the  changes  in  policies,  leadership  and  fortune. 

It  is  possible,  however,  that  our  weariness  is  caused  less  by  what 
is  told  than  by  what  is  left  unsaid.  Nothing  so  tires  a  traveller 
as  to  miss  the  aim  of  his  journey.  We  can  stand  long  miles  of 
dusty  tramping  if  we  are  reassured  from  time  to  time  by  glimpses 
of  the  delectable  mountains.  The  same  is  true  of  mental  journeys ; 
fatigue  is  largely  a  matter  of  frustration.  And  so  with  Thucydides, 
The  tale  he  tells  is  not  what  we  wish  most  to  hear.  Its  theme  is 
not  the  greatest  in  history.  Merely  as  a  military  event  the  war 
was  relatively  insignificant.  Compared  with  the  wars  of  Rome,  of 
Hun  and  Teuton,  of  mediaeval  crusaders  and  modern  nations, 
the  struggle  between  two  leagues  of  city-states  has  little  in  itself  — 
merely  as  war  —  to  attract  attention.  What  makes  the  Peloponne- 
sian war  of  lasting  interest  is  not  the  actual  fighting  but  the  issues 
at  stake  —  Greek  civilization  and  Athenian  greatness.  Our  minds 
wander  from  the  story  of  slaughter  to  what  remains  untold,  the 
achievements  in  the  art  of  peace,  which  alone  made  the  war  signifi- 


THUCYDIDES  165 

cant,  —  even  for  Thucydides.^  So,  if  the  narrative  compels  us  to 
follow,  —  and  no  one  can  dispute  its  power,  —  there  are  seasons 
when  we  shoulder  the  yearly  cuirass  with  reluctance. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  the  greatest  theme  in  history  lay  right  before 
his  eyes,  but  it  was  not  war;  it  was  the  Athens  of  Pericles'  and 
of  his  own  time.  Instead  of  describing  that,  a  work  for  which 
his  discriminating  temper  would  have  eminently  fitted  him,  he 
chose  rather  to  hand  down  as  part  of  "an  everlasting  possession"  ^ 
to  future  ages,  instructions  for  our  Von  Moltkes,  Kuropatkins, 
Joffres  and  Ludendorffs,  in  the  handling  of  spear-men  on  foraging 
campaigns !  There  is  no  glimpse  of  the  Parthenon  except  as  it 
looms  up  against  the  sky  where  the  refugees  from  Attica  watch 
the  flames  of  Spartan  pillagers  in  their  homes,  no  allusion  to  the 
drama  of  Athens  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it  furnished  at  least  the 
suggestions  of  the  mould  in  which  his  manual  of  warfare  was  re- 
cast into  the  tragedy  of  Hellas.  There  is  a  proud  consciousness  all 
the  time  that  the  Acropolis  is  there  and  that  the  art  and  literature 
of  Athens  are  a  shining  model  to  the  world,  but  all  references  to 
them  are  severely  suppressed  as  not  being  germane  to  the  subject. 
Only  once  does  Athens  really  come  into  the  history,  the  Athens 
to  which  subsequent  ages  looked  back  with  such  wonder  and  de- 
spair, —  and  that  is  in  the  funeral  oration  of  Pericles.  This  is 
enough,  however,  to  show  what  we  have  lost  in  the  refusal  of 
Thucydides  to  write  the  history  of  a  people  instead  of  that  of  a  war. 
No  city  ever  received  a  prouder  tribute,  or  one  more  eloquent.  It 
does  not  describe  the  monuments,  it  adds  another  to  them ;  for 
it  stands  like  a  solitary  block  of  prose,  set  in  the  midst  of  the  tragedy 
of  war,  —  a  Parthenon  itself,  hewn  to  enshrine  not  the  myth- 
goddess  of  the  city  but  the  human  spirit  of  its  citizens. 

An  orthodoxy  of  appreciation  surrounds  the  works  of  the  old 
masters  in  any  art ;  the  heretics  "fail  to  understand."  But  heresy 
has  a  moral  if  not  an  artistic  justification,  and  we  must  register 
the  disappointment  of  the  reader  of  Thucydides  who  comes  to  him 
in  the  hope  that  he  will  find  in  his  pages  a  living  picture  of  the 

*  C/.  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XI.  "Poverty- 
was  the  real  reason  why  the  achievements  of  former  ages  were  insignificant"  [and  the 
Peloponnesian  war  so  much  more  important  than  the  Trojan,  elc.]. 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXII. 


i66    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

cities  which  waged  the  war.  To  be  sure,  he  did  not  write  for  us ; 
he  wrote  for  Athenians,  or  at  least  for  Greeks,  and  they  took  for 
granted  what  we  wish  most  to  know.  But  the  fact  remains  that 
the  work  lacks  for  us  its  central  theme.  Much  has  been  made 
recently  of  the  influence  of  the  tragedy  of  iEschylus  upon  the  form 
into  which  Thucydides  threw  the  materials  of  his  history.^  It  is 
claimed  that  this  was  as  much  a  model  to  him  —  consciously  or 
unconsciously  —  as  the  epic  was  to  Herodotus.  But  for  the 
modern  audience  the  rules  of  the  tragedy  seem  strangely  violated. 
We  are  continually  behind  the  wings  where  the  kilHng  is  in  progress. 
The  principals,  too,  seem  to  move  across  the  stage  at  times  from 
insufficient  motives,  a  single  speech  of  rather  obvious  remarks 
determining  the  poUcy  of  a  city.  The  real  reasons  for  much  of  the 
intricacies  of  the  drama  remain  undiscovered.  We  miss  a  good 
chorus,  made  up,  if  possible,  of  the  business  men  from  the  Peiraeus, 
who  might  explain,  if  Thucydides  did  not  disdain  their  foreign 
accent,  the  real  causes  of  the  war  and  of  the  policies  of  Athens  — 
in  terms  of  economics. 

We  should  not  be  tempted  to  elaborate  the  shortcomings  of 
Thucydides  from  the  standpoint  of  the  modern  reader,  if  it  were 
not  for  the  fact  that  writers  on  Greek  literature,  and  even  historians 
who  should  know  better,  in  their  enthusiasm  over  the  magisterial 
performance,  where  the  scientific  spirit  dominates  as  nowhere  else 
in  antique  history,  give  the  impression  to  the  student  that  if  he 
does  not  find  the  History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War  completely 
satisfying  his  heart's  desire,  the  fault  is  all  his  own.  There  is  no 
fault;  there  are  merely  intervening  centuries.  A  work  of  genius 
may  be  universal  and  for  all  time ;  but  the  form  in  which  it  is  em- 
bodied bears  the  marks  of  the  local  and  temporary.  This  is  always 
true,  more  or  less.  In  art,  as  in  nature,  immortahty  is  of  the  spirit. 
That  spirit,  in  Thucydides,  was  poised  in  Hellenic  balance,  between 
science  and  art,  a  model  for  all  time ;  but  the  work  which  it  pro- 
duced shows  the  limitations  of  outlook  and  material  which  definitely 
stamp  it  as  antique.  To  see  in  the  author  of  the  Peloponnesian 
War  a  "modern  of  moderns,"  ^  facing  history  as  we  do,  equipped 
with  the  understanding  of  the  forces  of  history  such  as  the  historian 

^  Cf.  F.  M.  Cornford,  Thucydides  Mylhistoricus  (1907). 

2  Cf.  Th.  Gomperz,  Greek  Thinkers  (4  vols.,  tr.  1901-1912),  Vol.  I,  p.  503. 


THUCYDIDES  167 

of  today  possesses,  is  to  indulge  in  an  anachronism  almost  as  naive 
as  the  failure  to  appreciate  Thucydides  because  he  lacks  it !  There 
is  a  world  of  difference  between  the  outlook  of  a  citizen  of  Periclean 
Athens,  —  however  keen  and  just  his  judgment,  however  free 
from  superstition  and  creduhty,  —  and  that  of  a  modern  thinker 
supplied  with  the  apparatus  for  scientific  investigation.  The  whole 
history  of  Europe  lies  this  side  of  Thucydides,  and  it  would  be 
strange  indeed  if  the  historian  of  today  had  learned  nothing  from 
its  experience,  especially  from  the  nineteenth  and  twentieth  cen- 
turies, which  have  contributed  at  the  same  time  the  implements 
of  historical  research  and  the  widened  outlook  of  the  social  sciences. 
Yet  such  is  the  spell  which  the  spirit  of  Thucydides  still  exerts 
that  even  Eduard  Meyer,  the  historian  who  has  perhaps  done  most 
to  reconstruct  antique  history  in  the  Hght  of  those  forces  which  the 
Greek  ignored,  is  led  to  assert  that  there  is  only  one  way  to 
handle  the  problem  of  history,  that  which  Thucydides  first  used 
and  in  which  no  one  has  ever  surpassed  him.^ 

Were  Thucydides  alive  today,  we  venture  to  think  that  he  would 
be  the  first  to  dissent  from  this  judgment,  or  at  least  from  the  general 
implications  involved  as  to  the  character  of  his  work.  The  his- 
torian who  passed  such  impatient  strictures  upon  Herodotus  would 
certainly  not  rest  content  now  with  his  own  performance.  There  are 
at  least  four  major  elements  in  his  history  which  he  would  now 
recast.  In  the  first  place  he  would  have  to  admit  his  inability  to 
grapple  with  the  past.  He  lacked  both  the  implements  for  deahng 
with  it  and  a  sense  of  its  bearings  upon  the  present.  In  the  second 
place  he  failed  to  give  an  adequate  picture  of  Greek  politics,  keeping 
too  close  to  the  definite  politics  of  the  war  to  catch  its  working  as  a 
whole ;  and  he  missed  altogether  the  economic  forces  which  underlay 
so  much  of  both  war  and  politics.  Finally,  he  put  the  political  and 
diplomatic  elements  of  his  story  into  the  form  of  speeches  by  the 
leading  characters,  —  a  device  common  to  all  antique  historians, 
but  which  violates  the  primary  laws  of  historical  work  today. 

Let  us  take  up  these  points,  hurriedly,  in  turn.  We  have  said 
that  Thucydides  was  not  at  home  in  dealing  with  the  past ;  yet  his 
short  introduction   to  the  history  of   Greece  before  his  day  was  a 

1  Cf.  E.  Meyer,  Kleine  Schriften  (1910),  {Zur  Thcoric  und  Mdhodik  dcr  Gcsckichk), 
p.  67. 


i68    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

unique  performance.  The  paradox  is  not  difficult  to  explain.  His 
sketch  of  early  Greek  history  is  remarkable  mainly  for  what  it 
leaves  out.  It  does  not  fall  into  the  common  fault  of  early  historians, 
that  of  romancing.  It  does  not  exaggerate  as  poets  and  chroniclers 
did.  A  skeptical  spirit  and  sound  common  sense  kept  Thucydides 
from  yielding  to  that  greatest  of  all  temptations  to  the  story- 
teller, making  a  point  by  stretching  the  tale.  To  the  antique 
historian  this  was  much  more  of  a  temptation  than  it  can  ever  be 
again,  for  there  was  Httle  chance  that  his  audience  would  find  him 
out.  When  the  modern  historian  tells  a  great  story  he  is  at  once 
asked  for  his  sources,  and  before  the  book  is  fairly  started  on  its 
career,  a  dozen  other  historians  are  on  his  track,  busily  verifying 
the  account.  In  the  days  of  Herodotus  and  Thucydides,  the  past 
was  well-nigh  unexplored,  and  the  traveller  who  did  not  bring  back 
from  its  dim  horizons  some  trophy  of  what  might  have  been,  would 
miss  the  applause  which  he  might  otherwise  so  easily  win.  Thu- 
cydides cared  nothing  for  such  applause  and  proudly  broke  with  those 
who  did.  He  sought  the  truth  because  he  wished  it,  not  because 
his  readers  were  clamoring  for  it ;  yet  his  imagination  caught  the 
reward  of  future  centuries,  when,  as  he  foresaw,  his  history  would 
be  as  imperishable  as  the  truth  which  it  contained. 

But  there  is  a  world  of  difference  between  denying  the  fabulous 
in  the  past  and  appreciating  the  importance  of  the  obscure.  Be- 
cause the  past  lacked  greatness  Thucydides  thought  it  unworthy 
of  his  attention.  He  states  his  negative  conclusions  in  no  uncertain 
terms:  "Judging  from  the  evidence  which  I  am  able  to  trust 
after  most  careful  enquiry,  I  should  imagine  that  former  ages  were 
not  great  either  in  their  wars  or  in  anything  else."  ^  By  "former 
ages"  he  includes  everything  down  to  his  own  day.  Even  Salamis 
had  its  touch  of  pettiness ;  the  Greek  ships  were  partly  open- 
decked.^  Compared  with  the  great  age  in  which  he  lived,  all  that 
had  gone  before  seemed  poor  and  insignificant,  and  therefore  once 
having  convinced  himself  that  this  was  so,  he  ignored  the  past  as 
much  as  possible.  His  judgment  may  have  been  justified  by  the 
achievements  of  the  Athens  of  his  time ;  but  the  perspective  is  all 
the  same  a  barren  one  so  far  as  history  is  concerned,  for  his  narrative 

^  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I. 
2  C/.  ibid.,  Bk.  I.  Chap.  XIV. 


THUCYDIDES  169 

was  limited  to  the  events  of  his  own  day.  The  modern  historian 
has  no  such  outlook.  Although  he  lives  in  an  age  incomparably 
more  wonderful  in  many  ways  than  that  of  Thucydides,  he  knows 
better  than  to  despise  the  past.  On  the  contrary,  he  turns  all  the 
more  to  the  study  of  what  is  obscure  in  the  detail  of  former  civiliza- 
tions. He  does  so  not  to  supply  lessons  to  statesmen,  which  was 
the  main  purpose  of  Thucydides,  but  from  the  conviction,  forced 
home  by  science,  that  only  through  a  knowledge  of  how  things 
came  about  can  we  understand  what  they  are.  He  has  a  vision  of 
the  eternal  linking  of  past  and  present,  of  the  progressive  creation 
of  evolving  societies,  which  no  antique  man  could  possibly  have 
seen.  The  insignificant  gains  significance  when  fitted  into  such  a 
scheme,  just  as  each  stone  is  necessary  in  a  temple  wall.  Science 
builds  up  its  structures  out  of  the  neglected  data  of  the  common- 
place and  the  science  of  history  has  learned  from  it  never  to  de- 
spise a  past  however  obscure  it  seems  ;  for  its  fragmentary  evidence 
may  furnish  the  clue  for  the  recovery  of  some  vanished  civiliza- 
tion or  the  explanation  of  otherwise  inexplicable  elements  in  a  later 
one. 

The  fact  is  that  where  science  has  thus  determined  the  outlook 
of  the  modern  historian,  poetry  determined  that  of  Thucydides. 
He  would  have  vigorously  denied  it,  but  the  case  is  clear.  The 
epic  —  or  perhaps  dramatic  —  ideal  of  a  great  story  of  great  deeds 
was  his  ideal  of  history  as  well.  The  contrast  between  this  and  the 
scientific  outlook  escapes  us,  because  historians  have  generally 
followed  the  same  poetic  tendencies  down  even  to  our  own  time, 
seizing  great  themes  under  a  sense  that  they  alone  were  worthy  of 
great  histories.  Now,  however,  the  men  of  scientific  temper  see 
things  differently.  They  find  their  theme  just  where  the  great 
masters  refused  to  look,  —  in  such  a  past  as  that  which  Thucydides 
ignored  because  it  was  "not  great  either  in  wars  or  in  anything 
else."  The  result  is  that,  for  the  first  time,  history  is  disclosing 
its  hidden  perspectives  and  the  past  is  taking  on  some  of  the  color 
of  reaHty. 

Thucydides  failed  to  appreciate  these  things  not  from  any 
personal  limitations,  but  because  he  lived  before  scientific  history 
was  possible.  He  had  the  scientific  temper,  for  he  investigated 
everything  for  himself,  even  what  he  omitted.     But  science  demands 


lyo    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

more  than  individual  genius ;  it  rests  upon  the  cooperative  work  of 
many  minds,  amassing  data  and  preparing  implements  for  others 
still  to  use.  It  is  a  social  phenomenon,  indeed  the  most  highly 
socialized  there  is,  for  the  economics  of  the  search  for  truth  en- 
counters no  such  individualistic  tendencies  as  the  economics  of 
the  search  for  wealth.  So  the  investigator  of  today  has  ready 
at  his  disposal  a  vast  array  of  facts  already  estabHshed  and  duly 
classified.  Thucydides  had  no  such  heritage.  He  had  an  archae- 
ologist's eye  for  the  use  of  monuments  as  historical  sources,  for  he 
observed  the  broken  fragments  of  pillars  in  the  walls  of  Athens  and 
quoted  the  fact  as  a  vivid  proof  of  his  account  of  how  those  walls 
were  rebuilt  after  the  Persian  war.  He  even  used  inscriptions 
when  they  came  his  way.  But  it  is  a  long  step  from  such  anti- 
quarian interest  —  promising  as  it  is  —  to  the  systematic  investi- 
gation of  monuments.  He  could  only  speculate  as  to  the  wealth  of 
Agamemnon,  little  suspecting  that  the  treasure  chambers  of 
Mycenae  lay  waiting  for  a  spade.  Minos  was  to  him  but  a  name 
from  the  borderland  of  legend  and  history ;  now  the  excavations  of 
Cnossus  have  made  it  a  term  in  scientific  chronology.  No  prophecy 
of  genius  could  foretell  that,  when  the  search  was  wide  enough, 
and  the  implements  for  it  sufficiently  perfected,  the  merest  trifles 
of  antiquity  would  take  on  the  significance  of  historical  records; 
that  bits  of  tombstones  and  scraps  of  papyri  would  enable  us  to 
reconstruct  the  history  of  vanished  centuries,  or  help  us  to  correct 
the  narrative  of  great  historians. 

But  the  chief  handicap  of  the  antique  historian,  in  dealing  with 
the  past,  was  an  absence  of  exact  chronology.  It  is  hard  for  us 
to  realize  what  a  handicap  this  was.  Yet  the  more  we  examine 
the  history  of  History  the  more  it  becomes  apparent  that  until 
time  was  measured  it  was  not  appreciated.  We  have  already  seen 
that  it  took  many  ages  of  Babylonian  and  later  Egyptian  history 
for  the  mathematics  of  the  calendar  to  straighten  out  the  tangles 
of  days,  months  and  years,  until  a  systematic  chronology  became 
possible.  In  the  Greece  of  Thucydides'  day,  the  problem  had  not 
yet  been  solved,  and  the  perspective  of  the  past  was,  as  a  result, 
blurred  and  uncertain.  The  only  historian  who  had  attempted 
to  open  it  up,  by  a  systematic  chronology  of  Athens,  was  Hellanicus, 
and  Thucydides  soon  discovered  how  unreliable  his  reckoning  was. 


THUCYDIDES  171 

But  it  is  a  remarkable  fact  that  he  did  not  try  to  correct  or  improve 
upon  it.  He  frankly  gave  up  the  problem,  and  fell  back  upon  the 
most  primitive  of  all  methods  of  reckoning  time,  that  of  the  old 
farmer's  calendar  of  the  seasons.  Summer  and  winter  are  all  he 
needs,  the  summer  for  fighting,  the  winter  for  poHtics.  This  is  all 
he  needs  for  the  greatest  war  of  antiquity.^  Beyond  those  passing 
years  lay  obscurity  —  and  relative  insignificance.  He  saw  no  long 
perspectives  of  the  marshalled  centuries,  like  the  historian  of  today ; 
instead,  he  looked  but  vaguely  into  "the  abysm  and  gulf  of  Time," 
and  its  darkness  almost  enveloped  the  events  of  his  own  day. 

If  Thucydides  lacked  the  prime  qualification  of  a  modern 
historian  in  his  failure  to  handle  time-perspectives,  his  choice  of 
subject  bears  as  well  the  marks  and  limitations  of  the  antique. 
He  had  no  doubt  but  that  war  was  the  one  and  proper  subject  of 
history.  Had  this  been  true,  and  the  Peloponnesian  war,  as  he 
believed,  the  greatest  of  wars,  his  work  would  rank  without  a  rival 
among  the  achievements  of  historians.  For  the  very  sternness 
with  which  he  kept  to  his  theme  instead  of  offering  us  picturesque 
details  of  Greek  society,  as  Herodotus  would  have  done,  would 
be  in  his  favor.  Yet  even  here,  a  merit  may  easily  develop  into  a 
fault.  Thucydides  did  more  than  cut  out  the  digressions  of  a  story- 
teller ;  2   he  concentrated  upon  the  war  so  intently  as  not  only  to 

1  The  comment  of  Thucydides  upon  his  use  of  this  easy-going  method  of  reckoning 
time  is  worth  quofing.  "Ten  years,  with  a  difference  of  a  few  days,  had  passed  since 
the  invasion  of  Attica  and  the  commencement  of  the  war.  I  would  have  a  person 
reckon  the  actual  periods  of  time,  and  not  rely  upon  catalogues  of  the  archons  or 
other  official  personages  whose  names  may  be  used  in  different  cities  to  mark  the 
dates  of  past  events.  For  whether  an  event  occurred  in  the  beginning  or  in  the  middle, 
or  whatever  might  be  the  exact  point,  of  a  magistrate's  term  of  office  is  left  un- 
certain by  such  a  mode  of  reckoning.  But  if  he  measure  by  summers  and  winters 
as  they  are  here  set  down,  and  count  each  summer  and  winter  as  a  half  year,  he  will 
find  that  ten  summers  and  ten  winters  passed  in  the  first  part  of  the  war."  Bk.  V, 
Chap.  XX.  This  undoubtedly  has  its  advantage  for  contemporary  reckoning ;  but 
Thucydides  failed  to  see  that  the  calendar  of  the  war  had  also  to  be  set  in  the  chronicle 
of  centuries.  For  other  references  to  the  calendar  in  Thucydides,  cj.  Bk.  II,  Chap.  I : 
"The  narrative  is  arranged  according  to  summers  and  winters."  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XLVII : 
"As  soon  as  summer  returned,  the  Peloponnesian  army  .  .  .  invaded  Attica."  Bk. 
Ill,  Chap.  I :  "In  the  following  summer  when  the  corn  was  in  full  ear,  the  Pelopon- 
nesians  and  their  allies  .  .  .  invaded  Attica,"  etc. 

-  It  would  be  an  interesting  speculation  to  imagine  Herodotus  writing  the  history 
of  the  Peloponnesian  war.  We  should  know  much  more  of  the  history  of  Greece. 
Thucydides  holds  himself  so  closely  to  the  war  itself  that  there  are  only  four  digressions 


172    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

exaggerate  its  importance,  —  the  very  fault  he  found  with  the  poets 
and  chroniclers  before  him,^  —  but  even  to  weld  the  interrupted 
struggles  of  the  Athenian  and  Spartan  leagues  into  one  and  to  give 
the  impression  that  the  attention  of  Greece  of  his  time  centred  as 
exclusively  upon  the  war  as  did  his  own.  It  has  been  said  that 
Thucydides  himself  was  the  inventor  of  the  war  he  narrates,  and 
undoubtedly  he  cherished  a  fixed  idea  concerning  it;  for,  as  he 
tells  us  in  the  opening  sentence,  he  foresaw  its  significance  from  the 
first,  a  confession  which  shows  the  hmitations  of  his  outlook,  — 
which  is  after  all  but  another  name  for  a  biassed  mind.  So,  although 
subsequent  events  to  a  large  degree  justified  his  foresight  and 
approved  his  perspective,  there  was  undoubtedly  some  manipula- 
tion of  the  data  to  make  the  continuity  so  clear  and  to  ensure  that 
the  national  tragedy  develop  as  a  tragedy  should  —  impelled  by 
the  wilful  passions  of  men  under  the  hand  of  fate.^ 

Fortunately,  even  the  story  of  a  war  extends  beyond  the  field 
of  battle ;  it  includes  as  well  the  pohtics  of  the  combatants.  For 
one  must  hsten  to  the  speeches  in  council  and  watch  the  moving 
of  the  public  mind  to  explain  the  formation  of  alliances  and  the 
plan  of  campaigns.  So  Thucydides  interspersed  his  account  of 
military  operations  with  a  history  of  politics.  Indeed  he  seems  to 
have  spent  upon  it  more  elaborate  care  than  upon  the  details  of 
fighting.  This,  in  the  eyes  of  most  of  his  critics,  serves  at  once  to 
distinguish  him  from  all  his  predecessors.  He  had  left  behind  the 
tales  of  heroes  which  still  evoked  the  story-telling  qualities  of 
Herodotus.  Poets  and  chroniclers  "who  write  to  please  the  ear"  are 
scornfully  dismissed  for  a  study  of  statecraft  and  generalship.  But 
this  is  not  a  history  of  Greek  politics ;  it  is  only  a  history  of  the  politics 
of  the  war.  The  student  of  history  finds  in  Thucydides  almost  as 
little  light  upon  the  general  character  of  political  constitutions  of 

in  the  whole  history,  after  he  once  gets  through  the  introduction.  Because  he  plunges 
into  the  war  itself  (Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXIII)  at  the  opening  of  his  narrative,  he  reverts, 
in  an  excursus,  to  the  history  of  Athens  since  the  Persian  war  (Bk.  I,  Chaps. 
LXXXIX-CXVIII).  In  addition  to  this  he  inserts  a  short  account  of  affairs  in 
Thrace  (Bk.  II,  Chaps.  XCVI-CI),  a  description  of  Sicily  (Bk.  VI,  Chaps.  I-V),  and 
a  criticism  of  the  received  tradition  of  the  overthrow  of  the  house  of  Pisistratus 
(Bk.  VI,  Chaps.  LIV-LIX).  In  each  place  Herodotus  would  have  been  tempted  to 
insert  a  book. 

'  Cf.  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Pcloponncsian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  X,  XXI. 

2  Cf.  F.  M.  Cornford,  Thucydides  Mythistoricus,  Part  II. 


THUCYDIDES  173 

Greek   states  as  the  student  of   culture   does  of  their  life   and 
thought.^ 

.  We  shall  of  course  be  reminded  that  Thucydides  should  not  be 
held  responsible  for  these  omissions,  for  he  was  not  writing  con- 
stitutional or  cultural  history.  But  that  is  just  the  point  we  wish 
to  make.  The  scope  of  Thucydides  is  limited  by  that  of  a  war 
which  few  of  us  care  to  follow  —  in  detail  —  were  it  not  that  the 
genius  of  the  author  holds  us  to  the  task,  like  some  inexorable 
tutor  with  whom  one  reads  for  imaginary  examinations.  Disci- 
pline and  profit  accrue  to  the  reader,  and  the  text  is  one  of  the 
noblest  products  of  antiquity ;  but  it  fails  to  answer  the  questions 
we  have  most  at  heart. 

The  chief  weakness  in  this  story  of  politics,  however,  is  the 
failure  to  look  beyond  personal  motives  for  causes.  There  is  an 
almost  complete  blindness  to  economic  forces.  To  Thucydides  this 
was  a  world  where  men  willed  and  wrought,  of  their  own  account, 
through  the  impulse  of  passion,  and  met  success  or  frustration  as 
Fortune  {tvxv)  meted  it  out.  Fortune  was  the  determining  factor, 
the  unknown  quantity,  the  '^x"  in  the  problem;  but  it  was  con- 
ceived in  terms  of  rehgion,  not  of  business.  It  was  the  inexplicable 
Power,  the  Providence  beyond  the  reckoning  of  history,  the  Luck 
which  rules  the  primitive  world,  decked  with  the  regalia  of  philo- 
sophic mysticism.  Thucydides  had  no  idea  that  Fortune,  this 
substitute  for  the  caprice  of  the  gods,  was  interested  in  the  price  of 
commodities.  Conceiving  it  in  terms  of  mystery,  he  traced  its 
action  but  did  not  try  to  explain,  —  for  there  was  no  explanation. 
With  us  Fortune  still  plays  its  major  role,  but  it  suggests  economics 
and  invites  investigation,  for  it  is  mainly  a  synonym  for  wealth. 
The  very  element  in  history  which  meant  mystery  to  Thucydides 
is  therefore  offering  to  us  the  first  glimpses  of  natural  law  in  a 
natural  instead  of  a  spiritual  world  —  the  laws  of  supply  and  demand 
and  all  their  implications. 

The  shortcomings  of  Thucydides  in  this  matter  should  not  be 
overstated,  for  it  would  be  absurd  to  the  point  of  the  grotesque 
to  expect  from  him  an  economic  interpretation  of  history.  The 
economic   interpretation   of   history   is   a   very   recent    thing;  it 

'  To  be  sure  the  modern  historian  finds  much  illumination  from  many  passages. 
But  they  are  mainly  incidental  in  the  narrative. 


174    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

has  not  yet  eliminated  all  the  mystery  of  individual  will  and  is  not 
likely  soon  to  do  so.  But  it  is  just  as  absurd  to  claim  for  Thucydides 
a  perception  of  universal  laws  for  man  and  nature,  and  to  regard  his 
narrative  as  one  conceived  in  the  enlightenment  of  modern  science. 
This  is  the  point  of  view  advanced  by  the  older  literary  critics, 
whose  appreciation  of  Thucydides  has  become  the  standard  by 
which  most  readers  hasten  to  adjust  their  own  impressions.  It  is 
needless  to  point  out  further  how  such  extravagant  claims  reveal 
rather  the  scientific  limitations  of  their  authors  than  the  scientific 
triumphs  of  Thucydides. 

The  result  of  our  survey  is  the  conclusion  that  the  greatest 
historian  of  antiquity  was  impotent  in  two  of  the  major  require- 
ments of  the  modern  historian :  on  the  one  hand  the  mastery  of 
time-perspectives,  the  unravelling  of  the  past ;  on  the  other  hand 
the  handling  of  the  impersonal  forces,  material  and  social,  which 
modify  if  they  do  not  govern  the  course  of  human  events.  This 
does  not  detract  from  the  greatness  of  his  performance;  it 
could  not  have  been  otherwise.  He  did  not  have  the  chance  to 
measure  economic  forces  or  chronology;  the  implements  for 
doing  so  did  not  then  exist.  "We  must  constantly  remind  our- 
selves," says  Mr.  Cornford  in  his  suggestive  study  of  Thucydides 
Mythistoricus,^  "that  Thucydides  seemed  to  himself  to  stand  on 
the  very  threshold  of  history.  Behind  him  lay  a  past  which,  in 
comparison  with  ours,  was  unimaginably  meagre.  From  beyond 
the  Grecian  seas  had  come  nothing  but  travellers'  tales  of  the 
eastern  wonderland.  Within  the  tiny  Hellenic  world  itself,  the 
slender  current  of  history  flashed  only  here  and  there  a  broken 
gleam  through  the  tangled  overgrowth  of  legend  and  gorgeous 
flowers  of  poetry.  ..."  There  was  nothing  to  do  with  such  a 
past  but  to  leave  it  alone  and  turn  to  his  great  journalistic  enter- 
prise of  saving  the  world  of  fact  in  which  he  lived.  Skepticism 
might  keep  him  free  from  credulity,  but  it  could  not  forge  the  tools 
for  investigation. 

In  short,  the  mind  of  Thucydides  was  neither  primitive  nor 

^  F.  M.  Cornford,  Thucydides  Mythisloricus,  p.  76.  This  most  stimulating  book  on 
Thucydides  lacks  somewhat  of  Thucydidean  caution  in  the  way  it  forces  home  the 
comparison  of  the  work  wath  ^schylean  tragedy.  Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  the  pro- 
test of  classicists,  it  is  a  notable  contribution  to  historical  appreciation. 


THUCYDIDES  175 

modern;  it  was  antique.  No  recognition  of  modern  tendencies 
or  capacities  should  blind  us  to  its  limitations.  It  moved  with  the 
precision  of  supreme  self-consciousness,  but  within  narrow  confines 
both  of  time  and  space,  —  and  by  unknown  frontiers.  To  quote 
Cornford  again :  "Thucydides  lived  at  the  one  moment  in  recorded 
history  which  has  seen  a  brilliantly  intellectual  society,  nearly 
emancipated  from  a  dying  religion,  and  at  the  same  time  unaided 
by  science,  as  yet  hardly  born.  Nowhere  but  in  a  few  men  of  that 
generation  shall  we  find  so  much  independence  of  thought  combined 
with  such  destitute  poverty  in  the  apparatus  and  machinery  of 
thinking.  .  .  .  We  must  rid  our  minds  of  scientific  terminology  as 
well  as  of  religion  and  philosophy,  if  we  are  to  appreciate  the  unique 
detachment  of  Thucydides'  mind,  moving  in  the  rarest  of  atmos- 
pheres between  the  old  age  and  the  new.  Descartes,  for  all  his 
efforts,  was  immeasurably  less  free  from  metaphysical  preoccupa- 
tion ;   Socrates  appears,  in  comparison,  superstitious."  ^ 

Finally,  there  is  one  element  in  Thucydides'  work  which  bears 
the  mark  of  the  antique  on  its  face,  —  the  speeches  which  he  put 
into  the  mouths  of  his  leading  characters,  and  into  which  he  com- 
pressed most  of  the  politics  and  diplomacy  of  his  history.  Nothing 
could  be  more  unmodern  than  this  device.  Imagine  a  Ranke 
inventing  or  even  elaborating  orations  for  modern  statesmen  and 
then  embodying  them  into  his  narrative !  One  cannot  supply 
speeches  for  historical  characters  unless  one  has  the  text,  and  where 
the  Thucydides  of  antiquity  labored  most,  the  Thucydides  of  today 
would  give  up  the  task.  Even  from  the  standpoint  of  art,  the 
speeches  seem  now  incongruous  and  unreal.  As  Macaulay  said  of 
them,  "They  give  to  the  whole  book  something  of  the  grotesque 
character  of  those  Chinese  pleasure-grounds,  in  which  perpendicular 
rocks  of  granite  start  up  in  the  midst  of  a  soft  green  plain.  Inven- 
tion is  shocking  where  truth  is  in  such  close  juxtaposition  with  it."  ^ 

But  we  must  not  be  too  sure  of  our  judgment,  either  of  the 
antique  or  the  Chinese.  Each  must  be  judged  in  its  own  environ- 
ment. Certainly  no  one  in  Ancient  Greece  or  Rome  could  have 
guessed  that  a  historian  would  ever  object  to  the  making  of  orations 
as  a  legitimate  part  of  historical  narrative.  Speech-making  in 
story-telling  is  as  old  as  story.  It  is  natural  in  all  primitive  narra- 
'  Ibid.,  pp.  73,  74.  2  Essay  on  History. 


176    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

tion.  All  good  story-tellers  put  words  into  the  mouths  of  their 
heroes.  They  do  this,  not  as  conscious  artifice,  but  simply  because 
their  minds  work  naturally  in  dramatic  mimicry  —  the  mimicry 
which  is  a  direct  legacy  from  the  most  primitive  form  of  thought  and 
its  expression.  This  is  the  explanation  of  much  of  what  seems  to 
us  either  naive  or  questionable  in  the  Old  Testament,  where  the 
words  of  the  patriarchs  and  of  Jahveh  are  given  in  direct  narration 
by  authors  of  a  millennium  later  than  the  recorded  conversations. 
There,  however,  as  in  Herodotus,  the  general  background  of  the 
story  was  in  tone  with  such  primitive  dramatizing.  In  Thucydides 
the  case  is  different ;  his  mind  did  not  naturally  work  like  that  of  a 
gossip  or  a  raconteur,  by  the  impersonation  of  others.  He  kept  to 
the  old  devices,  and  made  up  speeches  to  suit  his  story ;  but  the  con- 
tent does  not  suit  the  form,  and  in  the  ears  of  a  modern  the  thing 
rings  false. 

Yet  we  should  not  forget  that  Thucydides  wrote  for  Greeks,  not 
for  us.  The  incongruity  is  there  because  the  work  survives  into 
another  age,  when  the  clamor  of  the  agora  is  stilled,  and  people  read 
instead  of  listen.  Oratory  no  longer  determines  the  fate  of  states. 
The  sneers  of  Bismarck  at  its  impotence  are  justified.  The  forces 
that  move  events  in  the  modern  world  seldom  find  expression  at  all, 
and  if  they  do  they  are  more  likely  to  be  embodied  in  figures  than 
in  words.  This  was  partly  true  too  in  the  ancient  world,  truer  than 
Thucydides  could  have  suspected.  But  it  is  well,  after  all,  that  he 
did  not ;  for  he  had  no  means  for  handling  it,  and  would  have 
merely  obscured  his  narrative  had  he  attempted  it.  As  it  was,  he 
left  us,  besides  the  story  of  war,  a  picture  of  the  leadership  of  men, 
of  great  speakers  swaying  the  passions  of  uncertain  crowds,  of 
councils  listening  to  the  thrusts  of  keen  debate.  If  we  are  always 
conscious,  as  we  look  at  these  scenes,  that  we  see  them  through  the 
eyes  of  an  interpreter,  we  at  least  have  the  satisfaction  of  knowing 
that  our  interpreter  was,  of  all  who  saw  them,  the  one  best  fitted 
to  transmit  them  to  posterity. 

Thucydides  began  his  history  with  the  expression  of  haughty 
scorn  for  the  tales  of  poets  in  the  youth  of  Hellas ;  prose,  not  poetry, 
is  the  medium  for  truth.  With  this  judgment  the  modern  critic 
agrees,  and  prosy  historians  have  found  in  it  much  consolation  and 
encouragement.     But  prose  in  the  hands  of  Thucydides  was  not  a 


THUCYDIDES  177 

bare  shroud  upon  dead  facts  to  ensure  them  decent  burial  in  ponder- 
ous books,  it  was  a  work  of  art  in  itself,  as  nervous  with  life  and 
energy  when  moving  with  the  war-bands  or  the  fleet  as  it  was  keyed 
to  the  eloquence  of  Athenian  oratory  when  dealing  with  politics 
and  diplomacy.  His  work  was  the  result  of  long  and  painstaking 
researches, — at  times  he  breaks  his  impersonal  reserve  to  tell  us  so,^ 
—  but  he  did  not  consider  it  complete  until  the  elements  of  which 
it  was  composed  were  worked  over  so  as  to  lose  their  outlines  in  the 
structure  of  the  whole.  Unlike  Herodotus  he  tried  to  obhterate 
his  sources  in  the  interest  of  art.^  Fortunately  the  art  was  noble 
enough  to  compensate  for  the  loss  of  the  materials,  and  secured 
for  the  facts  themselves  an  immortality  which  they  alone  could 
never  have  attained.  But  there  was  danger  in  this  polishing  of 
text.  Thucydides  himself  was  not  the  victim  of  rhetoric ;  he  lived 
and  wrote  before  the  schoolmen  had  fettered  language  into  styles, 
and  he  could  hardly  have  surmised  that  the  very  passages  upon 
which  he  concentrated  the  mastery  of  his  art  would  exemplify  a 
tendency  hardly  less  fatal  to  history  than  the  naive  credulity  of  the 
early  poets,  a  tendency  to  sacrifice  substance  for  form  —  in  prose. 
How  real  the  danger  was,  the  subsequent  chapters  of  antique  his- 
toriography show.  But  Thucydides  stands  out  in  as  strong  con- 
trast against  the  age  of  rhetoric  as  against  that  of  poetry.  In  him 
the  antique  spirit  is  revealed  at  its  best ;  but  it  was  antique. 

1  Cf.  Thucydides  [History  of  the  Pcloponnesian  War],  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  I,  XX,  XXII, 
Bk.  V,  Chap.  XXVI. 

*  So  definitely  is  this  the  case  that  one  can  readily  detect  where  his  hand  had  not 
given  the  final  touch. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Standard  critical  editions  of  the  text  of  Thucydides  are  those  of  J.  Classen 
(8  vols.,  1862-1878,  5th  ed.,  1914-  )  and  I.  Bekker  (1821,  3d  ed.,  1892), 
Other  convenient  editions  are  those  of  H.  S.  Jones  (Oxford  Library  of  Classical 
Authors,  2  vols.  [1902]),  and  C.  Hude  (2  vols.,  ed.  maior,  Teubner,  1901-1913). 
The  English  translation  of  B.  Jowett  (1881,  2d  ed.,  1900)  is  a  classic  itself. 
This  translation  has  been  used  in  the  text.  The  Loeb  Classical  Library  is 
bringing  out  a  translation  of  Thucydides'  Peloponnesian  War  by  C.  F.  Smith. 
Two  volumes  have  already  appeared.  For  textual  study  see  the  illuminating 
work  of  W.  R.  Lamb,  Clio  Enthroned  (1914).  For  general  discussions  see  the 
histories  of  Greek  literature:  G.  Murray  (1912) ;  J.  P.  Mahaffy,  A  History  oj 
Classical  Greek  Literature  (2  vols.,  1880,  3d  ed.,  1890-1891),  Vol.  II,  Pt.  I, 
Chap.  V;  A.  and  M.  Croiset  (5  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1896-1899,  3d  ed.,  Vols.  I-III 


178    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

1910-1914),  Vol.  IV,  pp.  87-172;  W.  V.  Christ  (sth  and  6th  ed.,  1908-1913) 
(6th  ed.),  Vol.  I,  pp.  476-493.  See  also  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  His- 
torians (1909),  Lects.  III-IV,  pp.  75-149;  G.  W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihler, 
Hellenic  Civilization  (191 5),  for  extracts.  Accounts  and  critical  estimates  of 
Thucydides  will  be  found  in  all  the  larger  Greek  histories,  but  by  far  the  most 
thoroughgoing  is  that  in  G.  Busolt,  Griechische  Geschichte  (3  vols.,  1893-1904), 
Vol.  Ill  2,  PP-  616-693.  See  also  G.  B.  Grundy,  Thucydides  and  the  History 
oj  His  Age  (191 1) ;  E.  Meyer,  Forschungen  zur  alien  Geschichte  (2  vols.,  1892- 
1899),  Vol.  II  (Thucydides),  pp.  269-436.  Of  especial  interest  is  F.  M.  Corn- 
ford's  Thucydides  Mythistoricus  (1907),  but  see  the  reviews  by  B.  Perrin  in 
The  American  Historical  Review,  Vol.  XIII  (1908),  pp.  314-316;  T.  Lenschau, 
in  Jahresberichte  der  Geschichtswissenschaft,  Vol.  XXXi  (1907),  p.  229  ("seit 
Ed.  Meyers  Abhandlungen  die  bedeutendste  Erscheinung  der  Thukydides- 
Litteratur")  ;  E.  Lange,  in  Jahresbericht  ilber  die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen 
Altertmnswissenschajt,  Vol.  CXXXVIII  (1908),  pp.  119  sqq.  For  the  life  of 
Thucydides  see  U.  v.  Wilamowitz-MoUendorff,  Die  Thukydideslegende,  in 
Hermes,  Vol.  XII  (1877),  pp.  326  sqq.;  but  see  R.  SchoU,  in  ihid.,  Vol.  XIII 
(1S78),  pp.  433  sqq.,  and  G.  F.  linger,  in  Jahrhiicher  jilr  classische  Philologie, 
Vol.  CXXXIII  (1886),  pp.  97  sqq.,  145  sqq.;  A.  Bauer,  Die  Forschungen  zur 
griechischen  Geschichte  (1899),  pp.  210  sqq.;  E.  Lange,  in  Philologus,  Vol.  LVII 
(1898),  pp.  465  sqq.  For  his  sources,  see  H.  Stein,  Zur  Quellenkritik  des  Thu- 
kydides,  in  Rheinisches  Museum,  Vol.  LV  (1900),  pp.  531  sqq.;  and  the  reply  of 
J.  Steup,  Thukydides,  Antiochos  und  die  angebliche  Biographie  des  Hermokrates 
in  ibid.,  Vol.  LVI  (1901),  pp.  443  sqq.;  A.  Kirchhoflf,  Thukydides  und  sein 
Urkundenmaterial  (1895) ;  L.  Herbst,  Zur  Urkunde  in  Thukydides,  in  Hermes, 
Vol.  XXV  (1890),  pp.  374  sqq.  In  general  see  E.  Meyer  {Thukydides  und  die 
Entstehung  der  wissenschaftlichen  Geschichte),  in  Mitteilungen  des  Vereins  der 
Freunde  des  humanistischen  Gymnasiums,  Vienna,  Vol.  XIV;  M.  Biidinger, 
Poesie  und  Urkunde  bei  Thukydides  (1891) ;  R.  C.  Jebb  {Speeches  of  Thucyd- 
ides), in  Essays  and  Addresses  (1907),  pp.  359-445;  Th.  Gomperz,  Griechische 
Denker  (3  vols.,  1896- 190 2),  Vol.  I,  pp.  408-413;  G.  Busolt,  in  Klio,  Vol.  V 
(1905),  pp.  255  sqq.;  E.  Kornemann,  Thukydides  und  die  romische  Historiogra- 
phie,  in  Philologus,  Vol.  LXIII  (1904),  pp.  148  sqq.;  J.  E.  Harrison,  Primi- 
tive Athens  as  Described  by  Thucydides  (1906). 

For  recent  literature,  see  Philologus,  Vol.  LVI  (1897),  pp.  658  sqq.;  Vol. 
LVII  (1898),  pp.  436  sqq.,  for  the  years  1 890-1 897.  See  Jahresbericht  iiber 
die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Altertumswissenschaft,  Vol.  C  (1899),  pp.  171 
sqq.;  for  1888-1899;  Vol.  CXXV  (1906),  pp.  166  sqq.,  for  1900-1903;  Vol. 
CXXXVIII  (1908),  pp.  119  sqq.,  for  1904-1907;  Sup.  Vol.  CLI  (1911),  pp. 
372  sqq.  E.  Drerup,  Die  historische  Kunst  der  Griechen,  Festschrift  fiir  W.  v. 
Christ,  Jahrbiicher  f^r  classische  Philologie,  Sup.  Vol.  XXVII,  pp.  443  sqq.; 
F.  Jacoby,  Uber  die  Entwicklung  der  griechischen  Historiographie,  in  Klio,  Vol. 
IX  (1909),  pp.  80  sqq. 


CHAPTER  XV 
RHETORIC   AND   SCHOLARSHIP 

Thucydides  left  almost  no  impress  upon  subsequent  Greek 
historians.  He  remained  a  great  name;  but  few  read  and  fewer 
imitated  him.  His  severe  yet  lofty  style  and  his  passion  for  the 
truth  were  foreign  to  the  taste  of  the  age  that  followed.^  For 
although  history  did  not  revert  to  poetry,  it  passed  into  the  field  of 
rhetoric,  where  the  ideal  was  a  striving  for  effect  rather  than  for 
fact.  It  was  not  until  in  the  first  century  B.C.,  when  the  old  Greek 
classics  were  revived,  that  Thucydides  became  once  more  an 
influence,  or  rather  an  ideal.  But  to  trace  this  farther  carries  us 
to  Rome.  Moreover  between  Thucydides  and  the  rhetoricians  lay 
another  historian,  known  to  all  those  who  even  begin  the  study  of 
Greek,  to  whom  we  must  now  turn,  though  only  for  a  hurried 
glance. 

Alongside  Herodotus  and  Thucydides,  the  ancients  placed 
Xenophon,  the  three  forming  for  them  the  trio  of  great  Greek 
historians.  Modern  criticism  has  a  much  lower  opinion  of  Xeno- 
phon. Soldier  of  fortune,  student  of  philosophy,  intimately  ac- 
quainted with  the  men  and  events  of  an  age  fateful  both  for  Greece 
and  for  the  history  of  the  world,  he  caught  no  gleam  of  its  larger 
meaning,  gained  no  sense  of  the  causes  and  little  appreciation  of 
the  results  of  the  happenings  he  chronicled.  The  sudden  fall  of 
Sparta,  for  instance,  he  attributed  not  to  its  own  rather  obvious 
faults  but  to  the  direct  action  of  the  gods.  Neither  Greek  nor 
Persian  history  was  clear  to  him  in  its  tendencies  and  significance. 

To  quote  the  discriminating  judgment  of  Professor  Bury  : 

"  In  history  as  in  philosophy  he  was  a  dilettante.  .  .  .  He  had 
a  happy  Hterary  talent,  and  his  multifarious  writings,  taken  together, 

*  Bury,  following  Wilamowitz-Mollendorff,  points  out  that  it  was  not  an  age 
favorable  to  the  composition  of  political  history  in  any  case.  The  engrossing  intel- 
lectual interest  was  then  political  science.  And  one  need  only  look  into  the  treatises  on 
political  science  written  by  the  theorist  today  to  see  how  history  suffers ! 

179 


i8o    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

render  him  an  interesting  figure  in  Greek  literature.  But  his  mind 
was  essentially  mediocre,  incapable  of  penetrating  beneath  the 
surface  of  things.  If  he  had  lived  in  modern  days,  he  would  have 
been  a  high-class  journalist  and  pamphleteer ;  he  would  have  made 
his  fortune  as  a  war-correspondent;  and  would  have  written  the 
life  of  some  mediocre  hero  of  the  stamp  of  Agesilaus.  So  far  as 
history  is  concerned,  his  true  vocation  was  to  write  memoirs.  The 
Anabasis  is  a  memoir,  and  it  is  the  most  successful  of  his  works. 
It  has  the  defects  which  memoirs  usually  have,  but  it  has  the 
merits,  the  freshness,  the  human  interest  of  a  personal  document. 
The  adventures  of  the  Ten  Thousand  are  alive  forever  in  Xeno- 
phon's  pages."  ^ 

This  adverse  judgment  of  the  modern  critic  would  seem  to 
leave  Xenophon  but  slight  claim  to  consideration  in  a  history  of 
History.  But  we  cannot  get  rid  of  him  with  quite  so  summary  a 
dismissal.  For  the  historical,  as  contrasted  with  the  purely 
biographical,  treatment  demands  of  us  that  we  keep  in  mind  not 
simply  the  appraisal  of  his  work  today,  but  also  the  opinions  of  the 
successive  generations  of  readers  who  have  judged  him  differently 
than  we.  The  very  contrast  between  the  high  regard  in  which 
Xenophon  was  held  by  the  ancients  and  the  slight  esteem  of  his 
modern  critics,  is  itself  a  fact  of  real  significance,  —  perhaps  the 
most  significant  one  which  the  work  of  Xenophon  presents  for  us. 
To  Cicero,  for  instance,  and  to  the  great  cultured  world  for  which 
he  spoke  —  and  still  speaks  —  Xenophon  was  one  of  the  world's 
classics.     Why  ? 

First  of  all  there  was  his  style,  graphic,  entertaining,  har- 
monious, "  sweeter  than  honey  "  as  Cicero  said,  not  heavy  with 
ill-assorted  facts  nor  dulled  by  too  much  philosophy.  But  apart 
from  style,  there  was  his  happy  gift  of  portraiture  and  his  descrip- 
tive concreteness.  If  he  failed  to  get  at  the  inner  connection  of 
events,  he  brought  out  all  the  more  the  personality  of  the  in- 
dividual leaders.  And  after  all,  it  is  a  fair  question  in  some  stages 
of  history,  whether  the  events  that  offer  themselves  to  the  nar- 
rator are  as  worth  considering  as  the  characters  of  the  actors. 
However  unenlightened  Xenophon  may  have  been  as  to  the  pro- 
cesses of  history,  as  a  memoir-writer  he  contributed  largely  to  the 
'  J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  pp.  151-152. 


RHETORIC  AND   SCHOLARSHIP  i8i 

little  there  was  of  that  high-class  Journalism  which  draws  its  charm 
from  an  interest  in  people.  The  appreciation  of  Xenophon  by 
the  ancients  was  therefore  based  upon  real  qualities ;  and  although 
they  are  insufficient  to  enable  him  to  hold  his  place  in  the  present, 
when  the  standards  of  history  reflect  the  wider  vision  of  the  social 
sciences  and  demand  a  control  of  causal  perspectives,  still  they 
are  qualities  which  endure. 

Xenophon  was  born  about  the  opening  of  the  Peloponnesian 
war,  and  died  when  the  power  of  Macedon  was  already  threatening 
to  close  the  last  troubled  era  of  Greek  freedom  (c.  430-354  B.C.). 
As  a  young  Athenian  noble  he  became  a  disciple  of  Socrates  and 
preserved  his  "  recollections  "  (Memorabilia)  of  his  teacher  in  four 
books,  which  present  the  homely  detail  of  an  observer  rather  than 
of  a  thinker  and  the  less  abstruse  side  of  Socrates'  philosophy.  It  is 
unfortunate  for  him  that  Plato's  account  lies  alongside  to  invite 
comparison.  Very  few  historians,  not  to  mention  journalists, 
would  measure  up  well  with  such  a  rival.  As  it  is,  however,  the 
Memorabilia  is  an  invaluable  human  document.  It  also  affords 
precious  glimpses  of  the  social  life  of  the  time.  But  though  this 
unenlightened  pupil  of  Socrates  failed  to  get  at  the  inner  connec- 
tion of  events,  he  brought  out  all  the  more  the  personality  of  the 
individual  leaders. 

Of  vastly  different  content  is  the  Anabasis,  a  narrative  of  the  war 
of  Cyrus  the  Younger  against  Artaxerxes  his  royal  brother,  and  of 
the  retreat  of  the  Ten  Thousand  Greek  mercenaries  in  the  service 
of  Cyrus.  Xenophon  was  elected  their  general  after  the  death  of 
Cyrus,  and  his  narrative  —  the  best  known  manual  to  beginners  of 
the  study  of  Greek  —  remains  a  clear  picture  of  the  marching  sol- 
diers and  of  the  hinterland  through  which  they  passed.  Moreover, 
his  description  of  places  and  his  geography  generally  have  the  merit, 
rarer  than  one  suspects,  of  being  relatively  accurate. 

The  formal  effort  of  Xenophon  at  the  writing  of  history,  how- 
ever, was  not  the  Anabasis  but  the  Hellenica,  an  attempt  to 
carry  on  the  history  of  Thucydides,  —  completing  the  Pelopon- 
nesian war  from  the  autumn  of  411  B.C.  and  terminating  at 
Man  tinea  in  362.  But  it  is  very  unlike  Thucydides,  in  both 
outlook  and  style.  It  moves  in  lively  narrative  and  where  a  bare 
story  of  intricate  events  would  pall,  it  interjects  personal  descrip- 


i82     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

tions  drawn  to  the  life.  Indeed,  so  well  are  these  done,  that  the 
reader's  interest  is  kept  stimulated  where  otherwise  it  would  flag. 
So,  although  there  is  an  undue  proportion  of  this  descriptive 
material,  it  is  so  successfully  handled  as  almost  to  turn  a  defect 
into  a  merit.  There  was  an  excuse  as  well  in  the  theme  itself. 
It  lacked  that  large,  compelling  epic  quality  which  lay  inherent 
in  the  Persian  wars  of  Herodotus  and  that  dramatic  unity  which 
Thucydides  revealed  in  the  struggle  against  Athenian  supremacy. 
The  pattern  of  Greek  history  was  becoming  more  puzzling,  the 
isolation  of  even  the  more  inland  states  was  giving  way,  and 
their  interaction  becoming  more  varied.  If  a  Thucydides  failed 
to  estimate  the  economic  forces  behind  the  fortunes  and  policies 
of  his  time,  Xenophon  should  not  be  blamed  too  much  for  sharing 
the  weakness  of  all  antiquity  in  this  regard.  The  Hellenica  was 
written  while  he  was  in  exile  from  Athens,  and  presents  the 
later  history  of  Greece  from  the  Spartan  point  of  view.  The 
Peloponnesians  were  having  their  day,  as  the  Athenians  had  had 
theirs  when  Thucydides  wrote.  But  the  times  were  no  longer  great. 
When  one  recalls  what  Sparta  was, — its  arid  intellectual  soil, 
its  unadjustable  hardness,  its  parochial  militarism,  —  one  is  surely 
justified  in  tempering  justice  with  charity  in  judging  the  limitations 
of  outlook  shown  by  a  writer  living  under  its  domination ;  even 
if,  beyond  the  narrowing  horizon  of  politics  and  culture,  he  could, 
looking  back,  recall  the  inspiration  of  a  great  adventure  with  ten 
thousand  Greeks  in  Asia,  or,  better  still,  could  treasure  as  a  lasting 
possession  the  personal  memories  of  Socrates. 

Between  Xenophon  and  Polybius  we  come  upon  a  period  which 
is  difficult  for  us  to  appreciate  justly,  the  age  of  the  rhetorician.^ 
The  very  name  is  forbidding.  Formal  rhetoric  not  only  repels 
the  scientist,  it  has  even  lost  its  charm  as  an  art.  We  find  it  hard 
to  be  patient  with  mere  words  when  we  have  so  rich  a  world  of 
real  experience  to  draw  upon,  and  few  who  study  the  evolution 
of  history  can  repress  a  condemnation  of  the  pupils  of  Isocrates. 
The  condemnation  is  justified  from  the  standpoint  of  science ; 
rhetoric  played  too  great  a  role  in  the  antique  culture,  and  facts 

^  Vide  R.  C.  Jebb,  The  Attic  Orators  from  Antiphon  to  Iscbus  (2  vols.,  1876,  2d 
ed.,  1893). 


RHETORIC  AND   SCHOLARSHIP  183 

too  little.  But  the  historian  of  History  must  temper  his  con- 
demnation or  run  the  risk  of  becoming  unhistorical.  Given  the 
antique  world  as  it  was,  he  should  not  expect  it  to  achieve  the 
modern  method.  The  art  of  Demosthenes  was  as  fitting  and  noble 
an  expression  of  the  maturity  of  Greek  genius  as  was  the  Homeric 
epic  of  its  youth.  From  the  standpoint  of  science,  the  Greek  mind 
was  always  hampered  by  its  art.  This  was  true  of  a  philosopher 
like  Plato  and  a  historian  like  Thucydides;  it  could  hardly  fail 
to  be  true,  in  a  different  sense,  of  those  who  lived  in  an  age  when 
the  great  creations  of  that  art  were  already  their  heritage. 

Rhetoric  is  to  us  largely  a  subject  for  school  children,  and  is 
branded  in  later  life  with  the  scorn  of  things  immature;  but  the 
Greek  ideal  was  not  altogether  vain.  The  great  art  of  expression 
by  words  is  surely  as  worthy  one's  study  as  arts  which  live  in  color 
or  stone.  At  once  plastic  and  monumental,  preserving  the  form  and 
color  of  reality  by  the  choice  of  the  clear-cut  word  or  the  finely 
moulded  phrase,  rhetoric  elevates  the  prose  of  literature  to  replace 
the  vanishing  art  of  poetry.  Its  field  in  antiquity,  however,  was 
limited.  The  ancient  city  lacked  the  varied  scope  of  modern 
journalism;  its  interests  were  mainly  local,  and  its  literature  was 
spoken  rather  than  written.  In  a  country  where  the  theatre  took 
the  place  of  our  libraries,  and  where  even  philosophy  was  largely 
dialogue,  it  was  but  natural  that  rhetoric  should,  in  its  higher 
forms,  tend  to  be  practically  a  synonym  for  oratory.^  Moreover, 
oratory,  in  a  Greek  city,  was  a  real  force.  The  arena  of  politics 
was  hardly  larger  than  the  amphitheatre  or  the  agora,  and  it  was 
possible  to  control  it  almost  as  definitely  by  the  voice  and  person- 
ality of  a  speaker.  But  oratory  was  not  confined  to  politics.  It 
was  an  art  cultivated  for  itself,  like  music  today,  and  "people  went 
to  hear  an  oratorical  display  just  as  we  go  to  hear  a  symphony."  ^ 
It  was  therefore  inevitable  that  speech-making  should  over-run  the 
narrative  of  history  and  the  play  upon  language  over-run  speech- 
making;  as  inevitable  as  that  the  histories  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury should  be  couched  so  largely  in  the  terms  of  national  politics, 
or  those  of  the  twentieth  include  the  survey  of  economics  and  the 

^  On  the  other  hand  the  rhetor's  work  in  the  general  art  or  discipline  pf  speaking 
was  almost  synonymous  with  education. 
^  J.  B.  Bury,  op.  cit.,  p.  174. 


i84    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

sciences.  The  invention  of  orations  in  history,  which,  as  we  have 
seen,  has  its  origins  in  primitive  story-telHng,  and  which  Thucydides 
took  over  from  his  predecessors  as  a  natural  part  of  his  expression, 
became,  in  the  age  which  followed,  a  definite  part  of  the  historian's 
trade,  and  not  more  in  Greece  than  in  Rome,  which  was  to  receive 
much  of  its  education  at  the  hands  of  the  Greek  rhetor.  So  Livy 
clogged  his  moving  narrative  with  long  discourses,  and  even  Caesar, 
orator  as  well  as  soldier,  would  halt  the  charge,  as  it  were,  to  deliver 
through  the  mouth  of  the  general  some  unnecessary  harangue. 

Yet,  as  we  have  seen  in  the  case  of  Thucydides,  what  seems  to 
us  artifice  was  often  genuine  art.  The  orations  which  are  now  so 
futile  and  unreal  gave  to  the  antique  mind  the  very  reflection  of 
reality.  We  must  judge  the  antique  historian  only  by  living  through 
the  politics  of  agora  or  forum  in  the  small  Mediterranean  cities 
where  the  living  voice  was  both  journalism  and  literature,  and 
where  the  destiny  of  a  state  might  at  any  time  be  decided  by  the 
power  of  a  ringing  speech.  Yet  one  may  carry  the  historic  imagina- 
tion too  far,  and  excuse  too  much.  The  rhetoric  which  brought 
popularity  to  the  historian  of  the  third  century  B.C.  brought  him 
just  as  surely  the  neglect  of  later  times. 

Formal  rhetoric,  however,  did  not  limit  itself  to  the  speeches. 
Such  obvious  devices  did  perhaps  less  damage  to  historiography 
than  the  general  tendency  which  they  represented  to  sacrifice 
accuracy  for  effect.  History,  at  best  a  poor  enough  mirror  of 
reality,  is  readily  warped  by  art;  and  rhetoric  is  art  of  the  most 
formal  kind.  It  distorts  into  ordered  arrangement  the  haphazard, 
unformed  materials  which  chance  produces  or  preserves.  It  sets 
its  pieces  like  an  impresario  and  completes  with  convincing  ele- 
gance the  abrupt  and  incomplete  dramas  of  reality.  All  history- 
writing  does  this  to  some  degree,  since  it  is  art.  But  rhetoric 
passes  easily  over  into  the  sphere  of  conscious  distortion.  A 
phrase  is  worth  a  fact ;  and  facts  must  fit  the  liking  of  the  audience, 
or  serve  to  point  a  moral.  As  few  facts  in  reality  do  lend  themselves 
readily  to  these  moral  and  aesthetic  purposes,  the  rhetorician  re- 
adjusts the  story  to  his  needs.^ 

The  age  that  followed  Thucydides  and  Xenophon  was  domi- 

'  Cf.  W.  V.  Christ,  Geschichte  der  griechischen  LiUeraiur  (5th  ed.),  Vol.  II,  pp.  228- 
233,  348-367. 


RHETORIC  AND   SCHOLARSHIP  185 

nated  by  the  influence  of  Isocrates.  Few  men  have  impressed 
themselves  upon  an  art  more  profoundly  than  he.  His  canons 
of  style  were  not  only  to  prevail  in  the  Greece  of  his  day,  but  to 
pass  on,  through  the  rich  rhythmic  periods  of  Cicero,  to  mould 
the  prose  of  many  a  modern  author.  Fortunately,  however,  this 
master  of  style  contributed  as  well  to  history  a  widened  outlook 
into  the  Hellenic  world.  He  viewed  the  politics  of  Greece  as 
essentially  one,  and  sought  to  inspire  a  common  patriotism  by 
appealing  to  the  pride  of  all  in  the  achievements  of  a  single  city.^ 
The  glory  of  Athens,  its  services  to  Greece  and  the  lessons  of  its 
democracy  were  held  up  to  other  states  as  an  ideal  for  the  future. 
But  the  forces  of  the  world  today  are  never  those  of  yesterday, 
and  when  the  long  spears  of  Macedon  wrecked  instead  of  realized 
the  dreams  of  the  great  orators  who  shed  such  lustre  upon  the 
last  age  of  Greek  liberty,  there  was  left  only  history  in  which  to 
embody  the  ideal  of  Isocrates. 

The  first  general  historian  of  the  Hellenic  world,  and  one  of  the 
most  popular  in  antiquity,  was  Ephorus,  to  whom,  according  to 
Photius,  Isocrates  assigned  the  task  of  preserving  the  more  distant 
past  in  fitting  mould.-  He  was  not  uncritical  when  dealing  with  both 
chronology  and  myth,^  but  he  rejected  the  ideal  of  Thucydides  to 
keep  his  speeches  closely  modelled  upon  the  originals.  He  frankly 
made  them  up,  and  was  especially  given  to  harangues  upon  the 
field  of  battle.^  Yet  he  seems  to  have  had  a  sense  of  their  proper 
use,  for  Polybius,  who  was  a  keen  judge,  says  that  he  has  "a  most 
elegant  and  convincing  digression  on  this  very  subject  of  a  com- 
parison between  historians  and  speech-makers,"  ^  and  speaks  of  the 

^  In  his  insistence  upon  the  need  of  a  general  war  of  all  Greece  with  Persia  in 
order  to  unite  the  Greeks,  using  Philip  as  the  weapon  and  instrument,  Isocrates' 
reliance  upon  a  military  salvation  reminds  one  of  Bismarckian  tactics.  The  death 
of  the  orator,  then  in  his  ninety-eighth  year,  followed  immediately  upon  Charonea. 

2  Cf.  Photius,  Bibliothcca,  Chap.  CLXXVT  (C/.  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Histoire  de 
la  litterakire  grecque,  2d  ed.,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  656-657).  Diodorus  and  Strabo  also  re- 
lied largely  upon  Ephorus  for  the  field  he  covered.  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Waltr licit  und  Kunst 
(1911),  pp.  151  sqq. 

^  Cf.  E.  Meyer,  Forschimgen  ziir  alten  Geschichte,  Vol.  I,  pp.  186  sqq.  The  in- 
fluence of  Isocrates  shows  itself  especially  in  his  smooth-flowing  style,  tending,  how- 
ever, toward  a  languid  diffuseness. 

*  Cf.  Plutarch  (Prcecepta  Gerendae  Reipublicae,  803  b)  includes  Theopompus 
in   this  remark;  cf.  W.  v.  Christ,  op.  cit.  (6th  ed.),  Vol.  I,  pp.  529  sqq. 

5  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  XXVIII. 


i86    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

work  as  a  whole  as  "admirable  throughout,  in  style,  treatment, 
and  argumentative  acuteness."  ^ 

The  name  most  commonly  linked  with  that  of  Ephorus  is  Theo- 
pompus,  to  whom,  according  to  the  story  cited  above,  Isocrates 
assigned  the  "modern"  field,  while  he  gave  the  past  to  Ephorus.- 
In  any  case,  he  wrote  two  important  histories,  a  continuation  of 
Thncydides  —  the  Hellenica  (in  twelve  books),  and  a  survey  of 
contemporary  Greek  politics  in  the  time  of  Philip  —  the  Philippica 
(in  fifty-eight  books).  He  was  gifted  with  a  lively  style  and  he 
employed  all  the  artifices  of  rhetoric  to  secure  effect,  —  a  Greek 
Macaulay  or  Treitschke.  Placed  by  the  ancients  in  the  front 
rank  of  historians,  his  work  has  suffered  unduly  from  the  ravages 
of  time  and  changing  taste.  Little  of  what  he  wrote  remains, 
his  works  not  having  been  copied  from  their  papyrus  rolls  into  the 

1  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  XXVIII.  Here,  perhaps,  mention 
should  be  made  of  the  fragment  of  a  Hellenica  of  greater  value  than  that  of 
Xenophon,  which  was  published  in  1908  by  B.  G.  Grenfell  and  A.  S.  Hunt  in 
Oxyrhynchus  Papyri,  Part  V,  pp.  143  sqq.,  since  the  most  recent  commentator, 
E.  M.  Walker,  in  his  lectures  entitled  The  Hellenica  Oxyrhynchia,  its  Authorship 
and  Authority  (Oxford,  1913)  decides  for  Ephorus.  It  had  been  attributed  to 
Theopompus  by  Eduard  Meyer  (Theopomps  Hellenika,  1909),  who  compared  the 
author  to  Schlosser  or  Macaulay,  by  Busolt,  Wilamowitz,  and  in  a  sense,  perhaps,  by 
the  editors  of  the  text.  Against  this  conclusion  were  also  ranged  such  scholars  as 
Blass,  Judeich,  Lehmann-Haupt,  Beloch,  De  Sanctis,  and  most  English  scholars  (see 
literature  in  Walker,  op.  cit.,  Lect.  I).  Bury  {Ancient  Greek  Historians)  argued  for 
Cratippus,  a  younger  contemporary  of  Thucydides,  who  continued  his  work.  Cra- 
tippus  had  objected  to  the  speeches  in  Thucydides  and  there  are  none  in  this  Hellenica. 
For  the  other  fragments  of  Cratippus  see  C.  Miiller,  Fragmenta  Historicorum  GrcBCorum, 
Vol.  II,  pp.  75  sqq.  G.  W.  Botsford  (Hellenic  Civilizatio7i,  Chap.  I,  Sect.  9,  p.  40)  is 
inclined  to  accept  Cratippus  as  the  author. 

2  Cicero's  chief  comment  deals  with  the  contrast  in  the  style  of  the  two  pupils 
of  Isocrates.  Cf.  Dc  Oratore,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  IX :  "  We  see  that  from  the  same 
schools  of  artists  and  masters,  eminent  in  their  respective  pursuits,  there  have  gone 
forth  pupils  very  unlike  each  other,  yet  all  praiseworthy,  because  the  instruction  of 
the  teacher  has  been  adapted  to  each  person's  natural  genius  ;  a  fact  cf  which  the 
most  remarkable  example  (to  say  nothing  of  other  sciences)  is  that  saying  of 
Isocrates,  an  eminent  teacher  of  eloquence,  that  he  used  to  apply  the  spur  to 
Ephorus,  but  to  put  the  rein  on  Theopompus ;  for  the  one,  who  overleaped  all 
bounds  in  the  boldness  of  his  expressions,  he  restrained;  the  other  who  hesitated 
and  was  bashful,  as  it  were,  he  stimulated  :  nor  did  he  produce  in  them  any  resem- 
blance to  each  other,  but  gave  to  the  one  such  an  addition,  and  retrenched  from  the 
other  so  much  superfluity,  as  to  form  in  both  that  excellence  of  which  the  natural 
genius  of  each  was  susceptible."     (Watson's  translation.) 

There  is  a  similar  remark  in  Brutus,  Chap.  LVI. 


RHETORIC   AND   SCHOLARSHIP  187 

codices  which  might  have  insured  their  preservation.^  He  travelled 
extensively  and  saw  things  at  first  hand ;  he  was  an  insatiable 
investigator ;  yet  the  exigencies  of  style  and  a  biassed  mind  vitiated 
his  work.^ 

Standing  apart  from  the  influence  of  Isocrates,  and  keenly 
criticising  Ephorus  and  Theopompus,  was  Timaeus,  the  Sicilian, 
who  passed  fifty  years  of  his  life  at  Athens  busied  with  antiquarian 
researches.  He  it  was  whp  instituted  in  history  that  dating  by 
Olympiads  which  henceforth  became  the  Greek  standard  of  chronol- 
ogy for  historians  and  the  learned  world,  although  it  never  was 
adopted  into  common  use.  He  was  an  indefatigable  worker  and 
investigator,  and  if  he  was  a  pedant  who  lacked  discrimination  and 
that  knowledge  of  the  world  which  enables  one  to  judge  men  and 
describe  events,  he  furnished  the  historians  who  followed  with 
much  information  otherwise  lost.  But  he  was  biassed  and  unfair, 
lacking  not  only  the  larger  vision  but  the  judicial  mind,  and  his 
attack  upon  his  predecessors  was  the  text  of  a  more  crushing  attack 
upon  himself  by  Polybius,  who  devotes  his  whole  twelfth  book  to. 
little  more  than  this  purpose.  Polybius  scorns  this  mere  dry-as- 
dust  who  spent  his  time  in  libraries  and  never  saw  the  world,  and 
who  is  a  stickler  for  small  points  while  he  fails  to  see  the  large  ones. 
But  however  much  remained  to  criticise  in  the  actual  achievement 
of  Timaeus,  it  was  something  to  have  him  protest  that  "history 
differs  from  rhetorical  composition  as  much  as  real  buildings 
differ  from  those  represented  in  scene-paintings " ;  and  again, 
that  "to  collect  the  necessary  materials  for  writing  history  is  by 
itself  more  laborious  than  the  whole  process  of  producing  rhetorical 
compositions."  ^ 

^  Diodorus  already,  in  the  first  century  B.C.,  reported  the  loss  of  rolls  of  Theo- 
pompus (.  .  .  Bibliothecae  Historicae,  Bk.  XVI,  Chap.  Ill,  Sect.  8). 

2  Fragments  in  C.  Miiller,  Fragmenta  Historicorum  Gracoriim,  Vol.  I,  pp.  278-333; 

Vol.  IV,  pp.  643-645- 

3  Quoted  by  Polybius,  The  Histories,  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  XXVIII  a.  (Shuckburgh's 
translation.) 

These  researches  of  Timaeus  in  chronology  naturally  bring  up  a  very  knotty 
problem,  that  of  the  material  upon  which  he  could  draw.  We  have  seen  the  general 
character  of  the  work  of  Hellanicus,  the  one  standard  authority  in  chronology.  After 
him  chronicles  of  Athens  {Althides)  continued  to  be  written,  and  grew  in  scope  to  in- 
clude all  kinds  of  happenings.  A  line  of  Atthid  writers  developed,  somewhat  like 
the  Pontifical  annalists  at  Rome.     (J.  B.  Bury,  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  p.  183.) 


i88     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

No  Greek  historian  arose  to  handle  the  greatest  political  achieve- 
ment of  the  Hellenic  race  —  the  Alexandrine  empire.  Ephorus 
had  written  the  national  story  down  to  356,  and  Theopompus  had 
covered  the  age  of  Philip.  There  they  stopped.  To  the  Hellenistic 
world  this  was  like  the  Old  Testament  story  of  Judaea  to  the  Chris- 
tians, But  the  story  of  the  great  Diaspora,  of  the  spreading  of  the 
Greeks  through  all  the  Orient,  of  the  building  of  new  cities  and  plant- 
ing of  Hellenic  colonies  over  to  the  heart  of  Asia,  of  the  widening 
of  language  and  the  vital  contact  with  Oriental  science,  religion 
and  philosophy,  all  this  remained  unwritten  by  competent  hands. 
The  Greeks,  at  the  moment  when  their  history  seemed  ended, 
emerged  upon  the  theatre  of  world  history,  not  as  local  patriots  nor 
the  art  creators  of  single  cities,  but  as  the  trained  and  competent 
interpreters  of  the  more  universal  phases  of  antique  culture.  The 
conquest  of  Alexander  made  possible  a  Hellenic  Orient,  —  as  great 
an  event  in  the  history  of  civilization  as  the  Romanization  of  the 
West.  But  the  epic  of  that  conquest  was  never  written,  not  even 
the  prose  of  it,  by  men  worthy  of  the  theme.  Fairy-like  stories  of 
Oriental  splendor  revealed  in  Susa  or  Babylon  found  ready  credence, 
at  a  time  when  truth  itself  was  so  incredible;  and  alongside  of 
them  are  narratives  of  some  of  Alexander's  generals  and  subsequent 
rulers,  like  blue-books  among  fiction.  Yet  the  Herodotus  of  the 
revanche  was  missing.     Instead,  the  last  great  Greek  historian  was 

Of  these,  Androtion,  the  pupil  of  Isocrates,  whose  Althis  appeared  in  330,  was  the 
main  source  for  Aristotle's  Constitution  of  Athens.  (See  articles  in  Pauly-Wissowa 
and  G.  De  Sanctis,  UAttide  di  Androzione  e  un  papirio  di  Oxyrhynchos  in  Atti  delta 
reale  accademia  dcllc  scienze  di  Torino,  Vol.  XLIII,  1908,  pp.  331-356),  although 
scholars  have  seriously  considered  whether  the  Constitution  was  not  actually  written 
by  Philochorus,  the  last,  and  greatest,  of  the  Atthid  writers.  (See  J.  H.  Wright  in 
American  Journal  of  Philology,  Vol.  XII,  1891.)  Bury  {op.  cit.,  p.  183)  goes  so  far 
as  to  say  that  "the  recovery  of  Philochorus  would  mean  a  greater  addition  to  our  his- 
torical knowledge  than  the  ' Ady)va.lij}v  IIoXtTefa."  This  last  work  is  the  only  one  of 
the  numerous  historical  treatises  of  Aristotle  which  has  been  recovered.  It  was  found 
in  Egypt  in  1890.  F.  G.  Kenyon's  text  (1891,  1892)  and  translation  (1912)  are  the 
best.  See  bibliography  in  G.  W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihler,  Hellenic  Civilization, 
Chap.  I,  Sect.  9.  This  work  does  not  entitle  Aristotle  to  a  place  among  the  great 
historians.  Under  his  direction  a  collection  of  158  constitutions  of  states  was  made 
for  a  comparative  study  of  politics.  In  a  sense,  therefore,  Aristotle's  place  in  the 
history  of  constitutional  government  is  that  of  a  scientific  pioneer.  But  he  seems 
to  resemble  an  antique  Montesquieu  rather  than  a  Stubbs  or  Waitz,  to  whom  Bury 
(p.  182)  compares  him. 


RHETORIC  AND   SCHOLARSHIP  189 

a  hostage  at  Rome,  writing  in  the  house  of  Scipio  the  story  of  the 
rise  of  the  western  imperial  repubhc  whose  armies  he  himself  saw 
sacking  the  treasures  of  Corinth  when  Greece  became  a  Roman 
province. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  most  recent  edition  of  Xenophon's  works  is  that  edited  by  E.  C. 
Marchant  (5  vols.,  Vols.  I-IV  [1900-1910]).  There  are  several  good  editions. 
The  translation  of  aU  the  works  by  H.  G.  Dakyns  (4  vols.,  Vols.  I-III,  1890- 
1897)  is  prefaced  by  a  short  biographical  study.  The  Loeb  Classical  Library 
has  announced  a  translation  of  Xenophon's  Hellenica,  Anabasis  and  Sympo- 
sium by  C.  L.  Brownson.  The  first  volume  has  appeared.  J.  B.  Bury's 
judgment  on  Xenophon  in  The  Ancient  Greek  Historians,  pp.  150  sqq.,  is  most 
severe.  See  also  H.  G.  Dakyns,  in  E.  Abbott,  Hellenica  (2d  ed.,  1898),  pp. 
296-352;  Sir  A.  Grant,  Xenophon  (1871) ;  A.  Croiset,  Xenophon,  son  carac- 
tere  et  son  talent  (1873) ;  F.  Leo,  Die  griechisch-romische  Biographie  (1901), 
pp.  87-93;  H.  A.  Gutschmid,  Kleine  Schriften  (5  vols.,  1889-1904)  {Aus  Vor- 
lesungen  ueher  die  Geschichte  der  griechischen  Historio graphic)  (Charakteristik 
des  Xenophon),  Vol.  IV,  pp.  328-335;  E.  Schwartz,  in  Rheinisches  Museum, 
Vol.  XLIV  (1889)  {Quellenuntersuchungen  zur  griechischen  Geschichte),  pp.  104 
sqq.,  161  sqq.  For  other  literature  see  J ahreshericht  iiber  die  Fortschritte  der 
klassischen  Altertumswissenschaft,  Vol.  CXVII  (1903),  pp.  47  sqq.,  for  1899- 
1902  ;  Vol.  CXLII  (1909),  pp.  341  sqq.,  for  1903-1908 ;  Sup.  Vol.  CLI  (191 1), 
pp.  402  sqq. 

The  classical  work  on  the  period  between  Xenophon  and  Polybius  is 
R.  C.  Jebb's  The  Attic  Orators  from  Antiphon  to  Isceus  (2  vols.,  1876,  2d  ed., 
1893),  but  the  section  devoted  to  The  Attic  Orators  (Chap.  I,  Sect.  10)  in  G. 
W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihler's  Hellenic  Civilization  (191 5),  is  now  the  best 
guide. 

The  works  of  Isocrates  are  edited  by  F.  Blass  (2  vols.,  2d  ed.,  Teubner, 
1885)  and  by  E.  Drerup  (Vol.  I,  1906).  There  is  an  English  translation  by 
J.  H.  Freese  (Vol.  I,  1894).  See  G.  Murray  (1912),  pp.  341-352;  A.  and  M. 
Croiset  (5  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1896-1899;  3d  ed..  Vols.  I-III,  1910-1914),  Vol.  IV, 
pp.  465-505 ;  W.  V.  Christ  (5th  and  6th  ed.,  1908-1913),  (5th  ed.).  Vol.  I,  pp. 
531-545  ;  J-  B.  Bury  (1909),  pp.  160  sqq.;  R.  C.  Jebb,  Attic  Orators,  Vol.  II, 
Chaps.  XII-XVIII,  pp.  1-267,  especially  Chap.  XIII,  pp.  34-58.  See  also 
R.  V.  Scala,  Uber  Isocrates  und  die  Geschichtsschreibung,  Versammlungen 
deutscher  Philologen  und  Schulmdnner,  1891  (41  u.,  42  vers.),  pp.  102  sqq.;  G. 
Misch,  Geschichte  der  Autobiographic  (1907),  Vol.  I,  pp.  90  sqq.;  Jahresbericht 
iiber  die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Altertumswissenschaft,  Sup.  Vol.  CLI  (191 1), 
pp.  308  sqq.;  Vol.  CLII  (191 1),  pp.  76  sqq.,  for  literature  for  1886-1909. 

On  Ephorus,  see  the  article  in  Pauly-Wissowa's  Real-Encyclopiidie,  Vol. 
VI,  pp.  1-16.    The  fragments  of  his  works  are  preserved  in  C.  Miiller,  Frag- 


190    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

menta  Historicorum  Grcecorum  (5  vols.,  1841-1873),  Vol.  I,  pp.  234-277,  Vol. 
IV,  pp.  641  sqq.  See  G.  Murray,  p.  389;  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Vol.  IV,  pp. 
655-662;  W.  V.  Christ  (5th  ed.),  Vol.  I,  pp.  498-501;  J.  B.  Bury,  pp.  163- 
165.  See  also  B.  Niese,  Wann  hat  Ephorus  sein  Geschichtswerk  geschriehen? 
in  Hermes,  Vol.  XLIV  (1909),  pp.  170-178;  E.  Schwartz,  Die  Zeit  des  Ephorus, 
in  ibid..  Vol.  XLIV,  pp.  481-502 ;  R.  Laqueur,  Ephorus,  in  ibid..  Vol.  XL VI 
(191 1),  pp.  161-206,  321-354;  M.  Budinger,  Universalhistorie  im  AUertum 
(189s),  pp.  32  sqq. 

The  fragments  of  Theopompus  are  collected  in  C.  MiiUer,  Fragmenta  His- 
toricum  Grcecorum,  Vol.  I,  pp.  278-333;  Vol.  IV,  pp.  643-645.  See  G.  Mur- 
ray, pp.  389-390;  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Vol.  IV,  pp.  662-674;  W.  v.  Christ  (sth 
ed.).  Vol.  I,  pp.  501-503;  J.  B.  Bury,  pp.  165-167.  See  also  J.  Dellios,  Zur 
Kritik  dcs  Geschichtsschreibens  Theopomps  (1880) ;  R.  Hirzel,  Zur  Charakte- 
ristik  Theopomps,  in  Rheinisches  Museum,  Vol.  XLVII  (1892),  pp.  359-389; 
G.  Busolt,  Zur  Glaubwurdigkeit  Theopomps,  in  Hermes,  Vol.  XLV  (1910),  pp. 
220-249;  E.  Rohde,  Kleine  Schrijten  (2  vols.,  1901),  Vol.  I,  pp.  345-346;  Vol. 
II,  pp.  19-25;  W.  Schranz,  Theopomps  Philippika  (191 2). 

The  texts  of  Timaeus  are  collected  in  C.  MuUer,  Fragmenta  Historicorum 
Grcecorum,  Vol.  I,  pp.  193-233.  See  the  histories  of  Greek  literature,  G.  Mur- 
ray, pp.  390  sq.;  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Vol.  V,  pp.  109-115;  W.  v.  Christ  (5th 
ed.).  Vol.  II,  pp.  168-171;  F.  Susemihl,  Geschichte  der  griechischen  Litter atur 
in  der  Alexandrinerzeit  (2  vols.,  1891-1892),  Vol.  I,  pp.  563-583;  J.  B.  Bury, 
pp.  167-170.  See  also  J.  Geffcken,  Timaios^  Geographie  des  Westens  (1892); 
C.  Clasen,  Historisch-kritische  Uniersuchung  iiber  Timaios  von  Tauromenion 
(1883) ;  A.  Hopf,  tjber  die  Einleitung  zum  Timaios,  Prog.  Erlangen  (1884) ; 
E.  Schwartz,  Timaeos'  Geschichtswerk,  in  Hermes,  Vol.  XXXIV  (1899),  pp. 
481-493 ;  J.  Beloch,  Die  Okonomie  der  Geschichte  des  Timaios,  in  Jahrbilcher 
fiir  classische  Philologie,  Vol.  CXXIII  (1881),  pp.  697  sqq.;  M.  Budinger, 
Universalhistorie  im  AUertum,  pp.  51  sqq. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
POLYBIUS 

The  historian  of  History  need  hardly  describe  the  works  or 
narrate  the  Hves  of  Herodotus,  Thucydides,  Livy  and  Tacitus, 
for  their  achievement  is  universally  known,  their  works  the  common 
possession  of  the  whole  cultured  world.  But  the  case  is  different 
with  Polybius.  Art  withheld  from  him  the  Hellenic  heritage ; 
he  was  no  master  of  style ;  his  history  is  not  among  the  world's 
best  literature.  He  is  generally  known  to  the  modern  reader  as 
a  name  in  footnotes.  And  yet  in  the  long  line  of  great  historians 
he  ranks  among  the  first.  He  is  par  excellence  the  historian's 
historian  of  antiquity,  and  in  our  own  day,  when  the  scientific  ideals 
for  which  he  fought  have  at  last  won  their  way  to  power,  his  figure 
emerges  from  the  comparatively  obscure  place  to  which  his  literary 
achievement  entitles  him,  and  reveals  itself  as  a  modern  among 
antiques,  critical  but  not  blankly  skeptical,  working  toward  con- 
structive principles  and  conscious  of  the  exacting  standards  of 
science. 

Polybius  was  a  noble  Greek,  born  at  Megalopolis  in  Arcadia 
about  198  B.C.  His  father,  Lycortas,  was  the  friend  and  successor 
of  Philopoemen,  the  patriot  leader  of  the  Achaean  league  —  that  last 
effort  of  united  Hellas  —  and  Polybius  himself  had  hardly  reached 
manhood  before  he  was  intrusted  with  high  responsibility  both  as 
ambassador  and  magistrate.  But  the  policy  with  which  he  was 
identified  —  that  of  strictly  maintaining  the  formal  alliance  with 
Rome,  neither  yielding  to  encroachment  nor  furnishing  pretexts  for 
aggression  —  had  little  chance  of  success  while  the  Roman  armies 
were  reducing  the  neighbors  of  Greece  and  Greek  warring  factions 
were  inviting  trouble.  Pretexts  for  aggression  can  always  be  found, 
and  accordingly,  after  the  battle  of  Pydna  in  168  B.C.,  Polybius  was 
carried  off  to  Rome,  along  with  a  thousand  others,  nominally  as 
prisoners  to  await  a  trial  which  never  came,  but  really  as  hostages 
to  insure  a  freer  hand  for  practical  imperialism.     Polybius  himself 

191 


192    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

fared  the  best  of  these,  for  he  was  taken  into  the  family  of  the 
victorious  general,  iEmilius  Paulus,  and  so  stayed  not  only  in  Rome, 
but  in  company  of  the  Scipios,  in  daily  intercourse  with  the  leading 
spirits  of  that  masterful  aristocracy  into  whose  hands  had  fallen 
the  destinies  of  the  Mediterranean  world.  This  favored  position 
seems  to  have  been  won  more  by  his  personality  than  by  his  dis- 
tinguished ancestry  or  position  in  Greece,  for  he  tells  us  with  winning 
frankness  how  the  young  Scipio  iEmilianus,  the  future  conqueror  of 
Africa,  sought  his  friendship  and  became  his  pupil.^ 

Situated  thus  in  the  centre  of  things,  Polybius  became  fired  with 
the  ambition  to  write  the  history  of  the  tremendous  epoch  in  which 
he  was  living.  "Can  any  one,"  he  asks  at  the  opening  of  his  work, 
"be  so  indifferent  or  idle  as  not  to  care  to  know  by  what  means, 
and  under  what  kind  of  polity,  almost  the  whole  inhabited  world 
was  conquered  and  brought  under  the  dominion  of  the  single  city 
of  Rome,  and  that  too,  within  the  period  of  not  quite  fifty-three 
years?"  ^  For  those  who  are  not  "so  indifferent  or  idle,"  Polybius 
left  to  the  world  a  scientific  achievement  of  undimmed  and  per- 
petual worth.  Forty  books  of  history  carried  the  story  from  "the 
first  occasion  on  which  the  Romans  crossed  the  sea  from  Italy,"  * 
in  264  B.C.,  through  the  varying  fortunes  of  the  Punic  wars,  down 
to  the  close  of  the  history  of  Carthage  and  of  Greece  in  146  B.C. 
Of  these  forty  books  only  the  first  five  have  come  down  to  us  entire, 
but  lengthy  portions  of  some  of  the  others  enable  us  to  form  a 
fairly  clear  idea  of  the  work  as  a  whole.  Moreover,  conscious 
of  the  intricacy  of  his  subject,  and  of  the  difficulty  of  handling 
intelligibly  such  a  mass  of  detail,  Polybius  like  a  true  school  teacher 
furnishes  us  with  explanatory  notes  and  even,  in  the  opening  of  the 
third  book,  with  a  sort  of  syllabus  of  the  whole  plan,  in  order  to 
make  sure  that  the  reader  shall  not  miss  seeing  the  woods  for  the 

1  Cf.  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  XXXII,  Chap.  X. 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I.  H.  Peter  remarks  that  Polybius  begins  with  Greek 
readers  in  mind  but  as  his  work  progresses  he  turns  to  the  Romans.  {Wahrheit  und 
Kitnst,  p.  263.)  Note  the  frankness  of  this  admission,  in  Bk.  XXXII,  Chap.  VIII: 
"And  if  what  I  say  appears  incredible  to  any  of  my  readers,"  let  him  remember  that  the 
Romans  will  read  it  and  "no  one  . . .  would  voluntarily  expose  himself  to  certain  dis- 
belief and  contempt."  The  extent  to  which  he  could  win  thoughtful  Romans  may 
be  measured  by  the  fact  that  Brutus  made  excerpts  from  him  during  the  campaign  of 
Pharsalus.     (Peter,  ibid.) 

3  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  V. 


POLYBIUS  193 

trees.  These  directions  and  hints  are  so  thoroughly  characteristic 
of  the  author,  as  we  shall  see  later  on,  that  we  cannot  do  better 
than  quote  from  them  Polybius'  own  conception  of  his  field  of  work. 
Apart  from  their  value  as  guides,  they  at  once  afford  a  glimpse 
of  the  half-apologetic,  half-proud  attitude  and  wholly  intimate 
relationship  which  Polybius  assumes  and  establishes  with  the 
reader : 

"  My  History  begins  in  the  140th  Olympiad.  The  events  from  which  it 
starts  are  these.  In  Greece,  what  is  called  the  Social  war,  the  first  waged  by 
Philip,  son  of  Demetrius  and  father  of  Perseus,  in  league  with  the  Achaeans 
against  the  ^tolians.  In  Asia,  the  war  for  the  possession  of  Coele-Syria  which 
Antiochus  and  Ptolemy  Philopator  carried  on  against  each  other.  In  Italy, 
Libya,  and  their  neighbourhood,  the  conflict  between  Rome  and  Carthage, 
generally  called  the  HannibaHan  war. 

"  My  work  thus  begins  where  that  of  Aratus  of  Sicyon  leaves  off.  Now 
up  to  this  time  the  world's  history  had  been,  so  to  speak,  a  series  of  discon- 
nected transactions,  as  widely  separated  in  their  origin  and  results  as  in  their 
localities.  But  from  this  time  forth  History  becomes  a  connected  whole :  the 
affairs  of  Italy  and  Libya  are  involved  with  those  of  Asia  and  Greece,  and  the 
tendency  of  all  is  to  unity.  This  is  why  I  have  fixed  upon  this  era  as  the 
starting-point  of  my  work.  For  it  was  their  victory  over  the  Carthaginians 
in  this  war,  and  their  conviction  that  thereby  the  most  difficult  and  most  es- 
sential step  towards  universal  empire  had  been  taken,  which  encouraged  the 
Romans  for  the  first  time  to  stretch  out  their  hands  upon  the  rest,  and  to  cross 
with  an  army  into  Greece  and  Asia."  ^ 

The  real  history,  therefore,  begins  with  the  third  book ;  the  first 
and  second  are  but  a  laborious  and  massive  prelude.  The  fifty- 
three  years  whose  unparalleled  achievements  he  proposes  to  chronicle 
are  those  from  220  to  168  B.C.  That  would  bring  the  narrative 
down  to  the  year  in  which  the  author  himself  was  carried  off  to  Rome, 
when  the  victory  of  Pydna  ended  forever  any  reasonable  hope  of 
the  independence  of  Macedon  or  Greece.  The  frank  subjectivity 
of  Polybius'  outlook  ^  is  reflected  in  this  original  plan.  He  proposed 
to  stop  the  survey  of  politics  where  he  himself  had  stopped ;  not 
consciously  for  that  reason,  but  because  from  the  home  of  the 
Scipios  it  had  seemed  as  if  the  Roman  conquest  were  over.     He  had 

*  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  III.     (Shuckburgh's  translation). 

2  "He  is  always  on  the  stage  himself,  criticizing,  expounding, emphasizing,  making 
points,  dotting  the  i's  and  crossing  the  t's,  propounding  and  defending  his  personal 
views."    J.  B.  Bury,  op.  ciL,  p.  211. 


194    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

become  an  imperialist  and  shared  the  imperiahstic  conviction  in  an 
*' inevitable  destiny."  It  was  from  this  point  of  view  that  he  con- 
ceived his  history.  Fortuna,  —  part  chance,  part  goddess,  —  had 
"made  almost  all  the  affairs  of  the  world  incline  in  one  direction, 
and  forced  them  to  converge  upon  one  and  the  same  point."  So  his 
history  was  to  culminate  in  the  unification  of  the  Mediterranean 
world.  He  knew  that  intrigue  and  hot  revolt  still  broke  out  in 
the  subdued  territories  but  such  things,  properly  reduced  in  size  by 
distance,  are  always  to  be  expected  on  the  verge  of  the  imperialist's 
perspective.  Later,  however,  Polybius  saw  that  the  task  of  imperial- 
ism was  not  completed  but  only  begun  by  its  conquests,  and  so  he 
carried  his  narrative  down  to  include  the  burning  of  Carthage 
and  the  sack  of  Corinth  —  at  both  which  events  he  was  present.^ 
The  reason  which  Polybius  gives  for  adding  this  later  survey 
is  interesting  and  important.  It  furnishes  us  with  the  clue  for  his 
conception  of  the  mission  of  the  historian.  We  may  as  well  quote 
him  in  his  own  downright  way.  It  is  clear  enough,  he  says,  that 
in  the  fifty-three  years  "the  Roman  power  had  arrived  at  its  con- 
summation," and  that  the  acknowledgment  of  her  supremacy 
had  been  extorted  from  all,  and  her  commands  obeyed : 

"But  in  truth,  judgments  of  either  side  founded  on  the  bare  facts  of  success 
or  failure  in  the  field  are  by  no  means  final.  It  has  often  happened  that  what 
seemed  the  most  signal  successes  have,  from  ill  management,  brought  the  most 
crushing  disasters  in  their  train;  while  not  unfrequently  the  most  terrible 
calamities,  sustained  with  spirit,  have  been  turned  to  actual  advantage.  I 
am  bound,  therefore,  to  add  to  my  statement  of  facts  a  discussion  on  the  sub- 
sequent policy  of  the  conquerors,  and  their  administration  of  their  universal 
dominion :  and  again  on  the  various  feeUngs  and  opinions  entertained  by  other 
nations  towards  their  rulers.  And  I  must  also  describe  the  tastes  and  aims  of 
the  several  nations,  whether  in  their  private  lives  or  public  policy.  The  present 
generation  will  learn  from  this  whether  they  should  shun  or  seek  the  rule  of 
Rome ;  and  future  generations  will  be  taught  whether  to  praise  and  imitate, 
or  to  decry  it."  ^ 

1  His  presence  at  the  sack  of  Corinth  has  been  disputed.  In  any  case,  his  account 
has  survived  in  such  poor  fragments  that  the  question  is  of  secondary  importance. 
He  was  evidently  there,  or  near  there,  shortly  afterwards.  Cf.  The  Histories  of  Polyb- 
ius, Bk.  XXXIX,  Chap.  XIII.  "I  saw  with  my  own  eyes  pictures  thrown  on  the 
ground  and  soldiers  playing  dice  on  them." 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  IV. 


POLYBIUS  195 

Here  we  come  upon  the  practical  aim  of  all  Polybius'  work  — 
the  pragmatic  character  of  it,  which  he  insists  upon,  time  and 
again.  History  was  to  him  no  mere  antiquarianism.  He  is  a 
practical  politician,  and  history  is  simply  past  poHtics.  It  is 
justified  by  its  utility ;  it  is  philosophy  teaching  by  experience,^  A 
knowledge  of  history,  he  says  in  another  place,  is  no  mere  graceful 
accomplishment,  but  absolutely  essential  as  a  guide  to  action.  It 
is  only  history  which  can  supply  the  statesman  with  precedents. 
The  present  offers  no  such  chances  as  the  past  for  judging  the 
relative  forces  of  circumstances  or  the  motives  of  men  : 

"In  the  case  of  contemporaries,  it  is  difificult  to  obtain  an  insight  into  their 
purposes;  because,  as  their  words  and  actions  are  dictated  by  a  desire  of  ac- 
commodating themselves  to  the  necessity  of  the  hour,  and  of  keeping  up  appear- 
ances, the  truth  is  too  often  obscured.  Whereas  the  transactions  of  the  past 
admit  of  being  tested  by  naked  fact ;  and  accordingly  display  without  disguise 
the  motives  and  purposes  of  the  several  persons  engaged;  and  teach  us  from 
what  sort  of  people  to  expect  favour,  active  kindness,  and  assistance,  or  the 
reverse.  They  give  us  also  many  opportunities  of  distinguishing  who  would 
be  likely  to  pity  us,  feel  indignation  at  our  wrongs,  and  defend  our  cause,  —  a 
power  that  contributes  very  greatly  to  national  as  well  as  individual  security. 
Neither  the  writer  nor  the  reader  of  history,  therefore,  should  confine  his  atten- 
tion to  a  bare  statement  of  facts :  he  must  take  into  account  all  that  preceded, 
accompanied,  or  followed  them.  For  if  you  take  from  history  all  explanation 
of  cause,  principle,  and  motive,  and  of  the  adaptation  of  the  means  to  the  end, 
what  is  left  is  a  mere  panorama  without  being  instructive ;  and,  though  it  may 
please  for  the  moment,  has  no  abiding  value."  ^ 

The  key-note  of  this  is  that  history  must  "instruct."  It  is  no 
mean  task  that  it  has  in  hand ;  the  lesson  which  the  tutor  of  Scipio 
Africanus  would  draw  from  it  is  nothing  less  than  a  science  of  politics. 
The  story  of  Hannibal's  march  upon  Rome  and  of  the  firmness  of  the 
Romans  in  the  crisis  is  told  with  equal  and  generous  admiration  for 
both  sides,  *'not  .  .  .  .for  the  sake  of  making  a  panegyric  on 
either  Romans  or  Carthaginians,  .  .  .  but  for  the  sake  of  those 
who  are  in  office  among  the  one  or  the  other  people,  or  who  are 
in  future  times  to  direct  the  affairs  of  any  state  whatever ;  that  by 

'This  time-worn  phrase  is  already  found  in  Ars  Rhctorica  (Chap.  XI,  Sect.  2), 
attributed  to  Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus,  in  a  paraphrase  of  Thucydides,  Bk.  I,  Chap. 
XXII. 

2  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  XXXI. 


196    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

the  memory,  or  actual  contemplation,  of  exploits  such  as  these 
they  may  be  inspired  with  emulation."  ^  Perhaps  the  clearest 
statement  of  this  conviction  of  Polybius  that  history  is  philosophy 
teaching  by  experience,  —  a  conviction  stated  many  times  over, 
—  is  his  comment  on  the  narrative  of  the  defeat  of  Regulus  in  the 
first  Punic  war : 

"I  record  these  things  in  the  hope  of  benefiting  my  readers.  There  are 
two  roads  to  reformation  for  mankind  —  one  through  misfortunes  of  their 
own,  the  other  through  those  of  others :  the  former  is  the  most  unmistakable, 
the  latter  the  less  painful.  One  should  never  therefore  voluntarily  choose  the 
former,  for  it  makes  reformation  a  matter  of  great  difiiculty  and  danger ;  but 
we  should  always  look  out  for  the  latter,  for  thereby  we  can  without  hurt  to 
ourselves  gain  a  clear  view  of  the  best  course  to  pursue.  It  is  this  which  forces 
us  to  consider  that  the  knowledge  gained  from  the  study  of  true  history  is  the 
best  of  all  educations  for  practical  hfe.  For  it  is  history,  and  history  alone, 
which,  without  involving  us  in  actual  danger,  will  mature  our  judgment  and 
prepare  us  to  take  right  views,  whatever  may  be  the  crisis  or  the  posture  of 
affairs."  2 

It  must  be  admitted  that  such  a  "pragmatic"  point  of  view  is 
not  altogether  reassuring.  A  historian  who  is  mainly  intent  on 
the  lessons  history  supplies  would  be  given  short  shrift  today  in 
the  courts  of  historical  criticism.  But  Polybius  was  saved  as  a 
historian  by  his  very  commonplaceness  as  a  philosopher.  He  never 
really  got  the  upper  hand  of  the  facts.  He  does  not  even  achieve 
a  systematic  conception  of  cause  and  effect,  so  necessary  to  the 
brilliant  distortions  of  philosophers.  He  talks  about  causes,  and 
allows  himself  so  much  as  two  chapters  in  one  place  to  point  out 
that  a  "cause"  and  a  "pretext"  are  not  the  same  thing. ^  But  he 
gets  little  farther  than  a  negative  criticism  of  his  predecessor,  Fabius 
Pictor,  who  had  not  even  seen  this.  In  spite  of  the  best  pedagogical 
intentions,  Polybius  did  not  lose  sight  of  actualities  in  the  search 
for  final  causes.  He  is  too  matter-of-fact  to  leave  the  facts.  His 
intensely  practical  outlook  makes  him  incapable  of  sympathy  with 
abstractions  and  keeps  him  down  to  the  task  of  securing  accurate 
and  fuU  data  in  the  field  of  realities  —  which  is  the  first  and  indis- 

^  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  IX,  Chap.  IX. 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXXV. 

3  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  III.  F.  M.  Cornford,  Thucydides  Mythistoricus,  p.  57, 
compares  the  looseness  of  terms  of  Thucydides  (Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXIII). 


POLYBIUS  197 

pensable  qualification  for  the  historian.  Polybius  is  intent  upon 
supplying  statesmen  with  lessons  from  experience,  not  with  theories 
of  what  might  have  happened.  In  a  discussion  of  the  constitution 
of  Sparta  he  says  that  it  would  not  be  fair  to  class  the  Republic  of 
Plato  "which  is  spoken  of  in  high  terms  by  some  philosophers" 
among  the  systems  which  have  actually  been  tried  out : 

"  For  just  as  we  refuse  admission  to  the  athletic  contests  to  those  actors  or 
athletes  who  have  not  acquired  a  recognized  position  or  trained  for  them,  so 
we  ought  not  to  admit  this  Platonic  constitution  to  the  contest  for  the  prize 
of  merit  unless  it  can  first  point  to  some  genuine  and  practical  achievement. 
Up  to  this  time  the  notion  of  bringing  it  into  comparison  with  the  constitutions 
of  Sparta,  Rome  and  Carthage  would  be  like  putting  up  a  statue  to  compare 
with  living  and  breathing  men.  Even  if  the  statue  were  faultless  in  point  of 
art,  the  comparison  of  the  lifeless  with  the  living  would  naturally  leave  an  im- 
pression of  imperfection  and  incongruity  upon  the  minds  of  the  spectators."  ^ 

This  sounds  less  Greek  than  Roman.  But  it  also  reassures  us 
that  the  author  is  not  the  man  to  be  drawn  into  the  realm  of  theory 
so  long  as  the  world  is  full  of  things  for  him  to  study.  He  wastes 
no  time  over  "final  causes,"  in  spite  of  a  constant  desire  to  bring 
up  the  question.^  Indeed  his  own  philosophy  of  history  is  not 
quite  settled.  He  begins  by  attributing  to  Fortune  the  great  drift 
of  events  which  resulted  in  the  imperial  unity ;  but  while  paying  a 
formal  tribute  to  the  goddess  of  luck,  he  in  practice  reserves  her 
for  the  more  unexpected  turns  of  affairs,  the  sudden  surprises  and 
the  inexplicable.^  "It  was  not  by  mere  chance  or  without  knowing 
what  they  were  doing  that  the  Romans  struck  their  bold  stroke  for 
universal  supremacy  and  dominion,  and  justified  their  boldness  by 
its  success.  No :  it  was  the  natural  result  of  discipline  gained  in 
the  stern  school  of  difiiculty  and  danger."  ^  The  theology  of 
Fortune  shares  the  fate  of  all  the  other  abstractions  at  the  hands 
of  Polybius.     He  is  not  interested  in  it,  but  in  the  facts. 

In  keeping  with  this  attitude  was  the  method  of  work.  Polybius 
was  a  student  rather  than  a  scholar ;    a  student  of  men  and  the 

1  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  XL VII. 

2  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  LXIII-LXIV ;  Bk.  Ill,  Chaps.  VII-IX,  etc. 
'  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  XXIX,  Chaps.  XXI-XXII. 

'  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  LXIII.  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  XXXVII,  Chap.  IX,  for  Polybius' 
ideas  on  Providence. 


iqs  introduction  to  the  history  of  history 

world  around  rather  than  of  books.  To  be  sure  he  spared  himself  no 
pains  in  his  investigations,  and  that  meant  much  scholarly  research ; 
but  he  always  regarded  that  as  of  secondary  importance  compared 
with  a  first-hand  knowledge  of  how  things  had  been  and  were  being 
done.  If  anything  could  shock  the  complacency  of  the  modern 
research-historian  who  sees  the  world  so  often  through  the  barred 
windows  of  an  alcove  in  the  archives,  it  is  that  attack  upon  Timaeus, 
the  learned  antiquarian,  which  fills  most  of  the  twelfth  book,  and  to 
which  we  shall  revert  later.  Polybius  holds  Timaeus  up  to  scorn, 
because  "having  stayed  quietly  at  Athens  for  about  fifty  years, 
during  which  [time]  he  devoted  himself  to  the  study  of  written 
history,  he  imagined  that  he  was  in  possession  of  the  most  important 
means  of  writing  it."  ^  One  must  have  served  in  war  to  know  how 
to  describe  it  accurately  and  well;  one  must  have  watched  the 
political  movements  of  one's  own  day  to  be  able  to  handle  those 
of  the  past.  These  qualifications  Polybius  had  in  a  superlative 
degree.  Of  a  good  deal  of  his  story  he  had  been  "an  eye-witness, 
...  in  some  cases  one  of  the  actors,  and  in  others  the  chief  actor."  ^ 
He  was  present  at  the  last  great  tragic  moment  of  Carthage ;  it 
was  to  him  that  Scipio  turned  to  confide  his  presentiment  that  Rome 
would  some  day  suffer  the  same  fate.^  He  knew  not  only  Romans 
and  Greeks  but  leaders  on  all  sides,  Massanissa,  for  example,  and 
Carthaginians  themselves.*  Then,  instead  of  staying  comfortably 
in  Rome,  he  set  out,  like  a  Herodotus  of  the  West,  to  see  the  new 
world  which  was  just  opening  up  to  civilization.  It  was  a  scientific 
exploration.  He  tells  us  that  he  confronted  "the  dangers  and 
fatigues  of  my  travels  in  Libya,  Iberia  and  Gaul,  as  well  as  of  the 
sea  which  washes  the  western  coast  of  these  countries,  that  I  might 
correct  the  imperfect  knowledge  of  former  writers.  .  .  ."  ^  His  ex- 
perience leads  him  to  a  wholesale  distrust  of  former  geographers ;  but 
then,  as  he  adds,  none  of  them  enjoyed  the  opportunities  for  finding 
out  about  the  world,  which  the  pax  Romana  now  afforded.  His 
curiosity  was  insatiable.  He  crossed,  himself,  the  pass  by  which 
Hannibal  made  the  Alps ;  at  the  other  end  of  Italy  he  deciphered 
Hannibal's  inscription  on  a  pillar  on  a  promontory  of  Brutium  in 

1  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  XXV,  Sect  d. 

« Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  IV.  '  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  XXXIX,  Chap.  V. 

*  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  IX,  Chap.  XXV.  *  Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  LIX. 


POLYBIUS  199 

order  to  establish  the  distribution  of  the  Carthaginian  forces.  He 
mapped  out  cities,  examined  records/  transcribed  treaties,^  and 
studied  earlier  historians.  But  he  seldom  found  an  authority 
with  whom  he  did  not  become  impatient,  and  perhaps  his  most 
striking  personal  note  is  his  persistent  criticism  and  distrust  of 
historians  and  his  frequent  disgust  with  them.  It  was  impossible 
for  one  of  his  direct  business-like  temperament  to  accept  the 
rhetorical  historians  of  his  day,  but  in  his  scorn  of  rhetoric  and  his 
impatience  of  bookishness,  he  went  so  far  as  to  miss  the  real  achieve- 
ments of  his  predecessors. 

This  attitude,  moreover,  had  a  personal  significance ;  it  reflects 
the  weak  side  of  Polybius.  For,  in  spite  of  all  his  prodigious  labor, 
he  never  learned  how  to  tell  his  story  effectively.  He  was  no  artist. 
He  had  none  of  the  easy  grace  of  Herodotus  nor  the  masterful  touch 
of  Thucydides.  It  is  rather  characteristic  of  him,  by  the  way, 
that  he  never  referred  to  the  former  and  mentioned  the  latter  only 
in  a  casual  remark.  He  had  nothing  to  learn ;  chose  to  work  out 
his  own  salvation,  —  and  almost  failed  to  win  it.  For  he  could 
not  weave  the  intricate  and  elaborate  pattern  of  world  history  with- 
out frequently  tangling  the  threads  in  the  effort  not  to  lose  them. 
He  knew  this  as  well  as  we  do,  and  time  and  again  came  into  the 
narrative  himself  with  digressions  which  are  excuses  and  explana- 
tions.^ This  is  what  gives  that  intimate,  personal  character  to  his 
history,  which  is  so  un-antique.  Herodotus  swung  into  his  theme 
with  the  abandon  of  one  who  knows  how  to  tell  a  great  story  well. 
Thucydides  worked  like  a  dramatist,  objectively,  submitting  only 
the  finished  product  to  the  audience.  Neither  of  them  invited  you 
into  his  workshop  or  interrupted  a  war  to  discuss  scientific  methods. 
But  Polybius  cannot  keep  himself  out  of  the  narrative,  and  once 
in  it,  he  gives  free  rein  to  his  feelings  as  well  as  his  views.  He  con- 
sistently loses  his  temper  when  he  finds  things  wrong  in  his  sources, 

1  Cf.  the  chance  remark  in  ihid.,  Bk.  XVI,  Chap.  XV,  that  a  document  at  Rhodes 
bears  out  his  account. 

2  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chaps.  XXII  sqq. 

3  The  following  passages  are  especially  valuable  for  their  comments  upon  style 
and  method  of  handling  :  Ibid.,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  LVI ;  Bk.  Ill,  Chaps.  LVII-LIX ;  Bk. 
IX,  Chap.  I ;  Bk.  XV,  Chap.  XXXVI ;  Bk.  XVI,  Chap.  XVII ;  Bk.  XXXVII,  Chap. 
IV;  Bk.  XXXIX,  Chap.  I. 

Perhaps  the  most  thoroughly  apologetic  is  his  opening  of  the  thirty-ninth  book. 


200    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

and  once  heated,  he  becomes  garrulous.  Untrained  —  for  a  Greek  — 
in  Hterature,  a  man  of  action  who  had  turned  school-teacher,  he  faces 
his  subject  like  a  problem  and  presents  his  research  like  solutions. 
He  lectures  his  contemporaries  and  berates  his  predecessors^  when 
they  fail  to  come  up  to  his  standard  —  which  is  generally  the  case. 
Then  he  apologizes  for  the  digression  and  settles  down  to  a  little 
more  narrative.  But  the  digressions  are  much  more  than  apologies ; 
for,  after  all,  Polybius  had  thought  deeply  on  his  own  task.  They 
rise  to  the  dignity  of  a  treatise  upon  history,  the  first  and  the  noblest 
statement  of  scientific  ideals  for  the  historian  until  the  days  of 
Ranke.  Indeed,  it  is  these  excursus  rather  than  his  great  theme 
which  give  to  Polybius  so  high  a  place  in  the  history  of  History. 
How  incredible  it  would  have  seemed  to  him  that  any  one  should 
read  his  history  for  the  sake  of  its  asides  instead  of  for  the  compelling 
interest  of  the  theme !  Yet  there  are  some  to  whom  even  the  rise 
of  the  Roman  Empire  is  of  less  significance  than  the  rise  of  the 
scientific  method.  After  all,  the  one  is  in  the  past,  its  potentialities 
are  well-nigh  spent ;  the  other  is  of  the  future  and  all  time,  and 
capable  of  untold  possibilities. 

This  treatise  is  scattered  throughout  the  whole  history  as  we 
have  indicated  and  indeed  is  exemplified  in  the  structure  and  method 
of  work.  Polybius  demands  the  truth  which  is  "  the  eye  of  History," 
and  insists  that  the  historian  must  give  up  all  partisanship,  all 
personal  bias,  and  making  himself  a  judge,  proceed  to  master  the 
facts  —  as  they  actually  were.  "  Directly  a  man  assumes  the  moral 
attitude  of  a  historian  he  ought  to  forget  all  considerations,"  such 
as  love  of  one's  friends,  hatred  of  one's  enemies.  ...  He  must 
sometimes  praise  enemies  and  blame  friends.  "For  as  a  living 
creature  is  rendered  wholly  useless  if  deprived  of  its  eyes,  so  if  you 
take  truth  from  History,  what  is  left  but  an  idle  unprofitable  tale?  "^ 
These  are  noble  words,  worthy  to  be  held  in  everlasting  memory. 
Unfortunately  they  were  almost  never  heard  and  —  in  spite  of  good 
intentions  —  not  apphed  even  by  those  who  studied  Polybius  — 
Cicero,  for  instance.  Polybius  does  not  say  that  historians  are 
given  to  conscious  falsification,  —  though  he  does  strike  that  note 
at  times,  —  but  he  is  keenly  alive  to  the  bias  that  partisanship 

1  Cf.  J.  B.  Bury,  op.  cit.,  Lect.  VI. 

2  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XIV.     Cf.  also  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  XII. 


POLYBIUS  201 

is  sure  to  give  to  a  narrative  even  in  honest  hands.  *'I  would  beg 
my  own  readers,  whether  of  my  own  or  future  generations,  if  I  am 
ever  detected  in  making  a  deliberate  misstatement,  and  disregarding 
truth  in  any  part  of  my  history,  to  criticize  me  unmercifully ;  but  if  I 
do  so  from  lack  of  information,  to  make  allowances  :  and  I  ask  it  for 
myself  more  than  others,  owing  to  the  size  of  my  history  and  the 
extent  of  ground  covered.  .  .  ."  ^  This  strain  runs  all  through 
the  work,  but  it  is  especially  concentrated  in  the  famous  twelfth  book 
in  which  Polybius  attacks  his  predecessor  Timaeus.  This  digression 
comes  near  to  being  a  treatise  in  itself.  The  student  of  history  who 
fails  to  be  stirred  by  it  —  considering  its  time  and  circumstances  — 
has  little  to  hope  from  anything  that  follows  in  this  survey. 

Polybius  believed  in  the  pragmatic  character  of  the  historian's 
office.  History  must  edify,  must  be  of  use.  But  it  loses  its  pragma- 
tism if  it  is  not  true;  it  is  only  an  "idle  tale."  And  this  is  the 
pragmatic  test  of  his  own  work.-  We  are  not  much  edified  by  the 
details  of  the  wars  in  Greece.  No  one  is  now  likely  to  become 
excited  over  the  institutions  of  the  Locrians  or  the  policy  of  Diasus. 
But  as  long  as  history  endures  the  ideals  of  Polybius  will  be  an 
inspiration  and  a  guide. 

1  Ibid.,  Bk.  XVI,  Chap.  XX. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

G.  W.  Botsford  and  E.  G.  Sihler  in  Hellenic  Civilization  (191 5),  Chap. 
XVIII,  Sect.  D  {Historical  Criticism),  give  appropriate  extracts  and  a  good 
bibliography,  to  which  reference  may  be  made  for  intensive  study.  For  the 
text  of  Polybius  see  the  edition  by  T.  Biittner-Wobst  (5  vols.,  ist  and  2d  ed., 
Teubner,  1889-1905).  The  best  English  translation  is  by  E.  S.  Shuckburgh, 
The  Histories  of  Polybius  (2  vols.,  1889).  This  translation  has  been  used  in 
the  text.  The  Loeb  Classical  Library  has  announced  a  translation  of 
Polybius,  by  W.  R.  Paton,  for  the  year  1920.  J.  B.  Bury  in  The  Ancient 
Greek  Historians  (1909),  (Lect.  VI,  pp.  191-220)  is  rather  hard  on  Polybius; 
compare  the  treatment  by  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Histoire  de  la  litter atiire  grecque, 
(5  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1896-1899;  3d  ed..  Vols.  I-III,  1910-1914) ;  (2d  ed.),  Vol. 
V,  pp.  260-295. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
LATER  GREEK  HISTORIANS 

Although  Polybius  may  justly  rank  as  the  last  of  the  great  Greek 
historians,  his  name  is  by  no  means  the  last  in  Greek  historiogra- 
phy. There  were  many  historians,  of  varying  degrees  of  impor- 
tance, among  those  Greek  scholars  who  became  the  teachers  of  the 
Roman  world,  and  while  individually  their  achievement  is  perhaps 
not  such  as  to  warrant  any  detailed  examination  of  it  here,  yet, 
taken  as  a  whole,  it  offers  some  striking  generalizations. 

In  the  first  place  the  incentive  to  history- writing  was  no  longer 
connected  with  that  first  stimulus  which  produced  it,  patriotism 
or  national  sentiment.  The  transplanted  scholar,  Hving  an  exile 
in  foreign  lands,  could  hardly  take  his  own  antiquity  along;  and 
if  he  did,  few  would  care  to  know  about  it.  On  the  other  hand  he 
could  not  acquire  the  antiquities  of  the  country  of  his  residence 
with  the  same  sentimental  appreciation  of  their  bearing  upon 
history  as  if  he  had  been  born  to  their  inheritance.  The  result 
was  a  certain  detachment,  upon  the  part  of  later  Greek  scholars, 
which  in  some  cases  seems  to  have  made  for  indifference  as  to  those 
movements  of  cause  and  effect  that  so  intrigued  the  keen  intelligence 
of  Polybius  and  left  them  rather  dilettanti  antiquarians,  and  on 
the  other  hand  made  for  an  enlargement  of  view  that  carried  the 
better  minds  beyond  the  narrow  confines  of  purely  Roman  pa- 
triotism and  gave  them  a  glimpse  of  world  history. 

It  is  hard  to  say  why  the  obvious  advantages  of  such  a  detached 
position  were  not  exploited  more.  The  Hellenistic  Greek  could 
view  many  of  the  historical  problems  of  antiquity  with  much  the 
same  kind  of  aloofness  as  that  which  the  modern  scholar  brings  to 
the  study  of  the  Middle  Ages.  One  might  even  expect  that  the 
economic  stimulus  of  earning  a  living  by  one's  wits  would  have 
stirred  the  Greek  intellectuals,  who  graced  the  households  of  the 
masters  of  the  world  as  slaves,  freedmen  or  dependents,  to  notable 


LATER   GREEK   HISTORIANS  203 

achievement  in  that  kind  of  research  which  leads  to  systematic 
results  along  scientific  lines.  But  rhetoric  on  the  one  hand,  and 
philosophy  on  the  other  proved  to  be  the  winning  rivals. 

Mention  of  Greek  philosophy  in  this  connection  recalls  the  fact 
that  we  have  hardly  spoken  of  it  before.  Rhetoric  and  the  influence 
of  Isocrates  have  come  very  largely  to  the  fore ;  but  what  of  the 
influence  of  philosophy  upon  Greek  historiography?  Plato  has 
so  far  escaped  any  but  casual  mention,  and  Aristotle  has  come 
within  our  survey  only  in  a  footnote !  Yet  the  greatest  creations 
of  Greek  thought  could  not  but  affect  the  outlook  of  historians, 
even  if  they  contributed  little  directly.  Truth  was  an  ideal  of 
philosophy  as  of  history,  and  in  the  recognition  of  social  virtues 
as  historic  forces,  or  even  in  the  whole  pragmatic  quality  of  such  a 
work  as  that  of  Polybius,  there  may  be  as  much  an  index  of  Stoic 
influence  upon  the  writer's  trend  of  thought  as  of  his  direct  power 
of  observation.^  The  lessons  which  history  supplies  to  one  trained 
in  the  principles  of  such  a  philosophy  are  not  the  same  as  those 
which  it  would  bring  to  a  Herodotus. 

To  follow  these  suggestions  would  lead  one  into  intricate  j&elds 
of  scholarship,  far  beyond  our  bounds.  The  history  of  the  philos- 
ophy of  Greek  historiography  may  best  be  left  for  the  specialist. 
This,  of  course,  implies  that  the  contribution  of  philosophy  to 
history  was  a  limited  one.  For  while  it  offered  points  of  view  to 
historians,  it  failed  to  provide  that  apparatus  of  criticism  which 
is  the  basis  of  science.  Aristotle,  it  is  true,  made  a  beginning ;  but 
the  influence  of  Plato  told  in  the  other  direction.  Although  it  was 
a  great  thing  to  have  justified  the  supremacy  of  reason,  as  he  did, 
and  to  have  insisted  upon  the  identity  of  truth  and  good,  the 
abstract  tendency  of  his  speculation  unified  that  assemblage  of 
data,  which  is  the  investigator's  universe,  by  means  of  the  most 
unhistorical  line  of  thought  imaginable,  his  theory  of  ideas.  Meta- 
physics and  history  have  not  much  in  common. 

But  the  interest  of  thinkers  in  ideas  rather  than  in  facts  was  less 
responsible  for  the  Hmited  progress  of  antique  historiography  than 
the  failure  to  recognize  the  value  of  mechanism.     There  is  a  striking 

'  An  excellent  short  account  of  this  subject  is  to  be  found  in  H.  Peter,  Wahrheil 
und  Kunst,  Chap.  VII  {Die  Stoa,  Polybios,  Poseidonios  und  Strabon). 


1204    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

passage  in  PhcEdrus  in  which,  according  to  Plato,  Socrates  laments 
the  passing  of  that  time  when  the  only  known  facts  about  the  past 
were  those  treasured  in  memory  and  the  coming  of  that  degenerate 
age  when  people  no  longer  bother  remembering  things  they  can 
read  in  books. ^  He  deprecates  above  all  the  invention  of  writing. 
Reliance  on  such  devices  lessens  the  capacities  of  the  user  for  dis- 
tinguishing truth  from  its  semblance.  It  is  a  specious  argument; 
and  one  might  think  that  his  pupil  Plato,  recording  it  —  in  writing  — 
might  do  so  with  a  sense  of  the  humor  of  the  situation.  But  there 
is  no  sign  of  it.  For,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  this  objection  of  Socrates 
to  alphabets  was  but  a  single  expression  of  something  reaching 
deeply  through  the  whole  trend  of  Plato's  mind.  That  mind  was 
fundamentally  poetic.  It  recoiled  against  mechanism  tempera- 
mentally. It  felt  instinctively  that  making  black  marks  on  papy- 
rus from  Egypt  or  skins  from  Asia  —  those  skins  the  merchants  of 
Pergamum  later  made  into  parchments  —  is  an  inferior  operation  to 
reciting  an  epic.  It  is  the  same  kind  of  protest  that  we  have  today 
on  the  part  of  those  who  prefer  hand  labor  to  machinery.  Socrates, 
one  supposes,  would  have  preferred  to  tell  the  time  by  a  guess  at 
the  lengthening  shadow  on  the  square  rather  than  by  using  a 
watch.     By  ignoring  inventions  one  keeps  "close  to  nature." 

This  is  an  attitude  to  be  found  through  the  whole  history  of 
culture.  Its  most  earnest  advocates  have  been  the  artists,  of  every 
kind  of  expression,  impatient  of  anything  interposed  between 
nature  and  the  individual.  It  partly  springs  from  the  concen- 
tration of  a  creator  on  his  creation  —  that  concentration  which  is 
joy,  —  leaving  him  relatively  indifferent  as  to  its  preservation. 
Idealism,  drawn  to  this  romantic  sentiment,  has  often  denied  itself 
the  means  of  achievement,  by  holding  aloof  from  the  processes  by 
which  ideas  are  realized.  It  is  curious  how  short-sighted  it  has 
been.  For,  in  the  larger  view,  mechanism  itself  is  an  art-creation. 
The  invention  of  an  alphabet  is  a  work  of  art  to  rank  beside  poetry. 
In  its  use  it  is  part  of  the  clothing  of  thought,  Hke  the  words  them- 
selves ;  and  shares  the  immortaUty  which  it  assures.  Even  machin- 
ery, which  supplants  the  motions  of  the  hand  of  the  worker, 
incorporates  thought  in  its  materials,  just  as  marble  bears  the 
impress  of  a  sculptor's  imagination  or  the  massing  of  pigment  on 

^  Phadrus,  274-275  D. 


LATER   GREEK   HISTORIANS  205 

a  painter's  canvas  preserves  the  suggestion  of  nature.  Being  a 
social  rather  than  an  individual  creation,  however,  the  appreciation 
of  it  is  more  difficult. 

Greek  philosophy  missed  the  great  point  that  the  power  of  ideas 
works  itself  out  in  a  grimy  world,  the  world  of  daily  life.  History 
■depends  upon  that  mechanism  which  transfers  thought  from 
brains  to  material  substances,  and  so  enables  thought  to  endure 
while  thinkers  come  and  go.  It  is  rather  sobering  to  recall  how 
much  depends  upon  the  substance.  We  know,  for  instance,  that 
the  burning  of  the  library  at  Alexandria  blotted  out  for  all  time 
much  of  the  culture  of  that  distant  antiquity  which  it  had  gathered 
in  the  papyri  on  its  shelves.  We  know,  as  well,  that  the  last 
classics  of  Greece  and  Rome  perished  in  the  mouldy  rolls  of  papyrus 
which  could  not  last  in  the  climate  of  the  northern  Mediterranean. 
The  book  trade  of  the  ancients  was  careless  of  the  future,  —  as  ours 
is  today.  But  had  it  not  been  for  papyrus  rolls  dealt  in  by  those 
astute  traders  who  brought  their  goods  to  the  wharves  of  the 
Peiraeus  and  Ostia,  it  is  doubtful  if  the  literature  of  classic  Greece 
and  Rome  would  have  been  produced  at  all.  Had  there  been 
nothing  better  than  clay  tablets  to  scratch,  how  would  the  Augustan 
age  have  achieved  what  it  did  ?  Imagine  Polybius  or  Livy  accumu- 
lating the  mud  cylinders  necessary  for  their  histories !  Or,  to  bring 
the  matter  down  to  our  own  time,  what  would  our  modern  litera- 
ture and  journalism  amount  to  if  the  art  of  making  paper  had  not 
been  brought  to  Europe  by  the  Arabs?  A  printing  press  without 
paper  is  unthinkable ;  and  modern  hterature  cannot  exist  without 
them  both.  We  need  a  Sartor  Resartus  in  the  history  of  literature 
to  show  us  how  naked  and  helplessly  limited  is  thought  except 
when  provided  with  mechanism. 

There  have  been  two  great  creative  epochs  in  the  history  of  our 
civilization  ;  that  of  ancient  Greece  and  that  of  today.  The  one  pro- 
duced critical  thought ;  the  other  applied  it  to  invent  machines.  Be- 
side these  two  contributions  to  secular  society,  all  others  rank  as  mi- 
nor. The  one  stirred  into  activity  that  critical  intelligence,  upon 
which  rests  our  whole  apparatus  of  knowledge ;  the  other  made 
nature  our  ally  not  merely  by  applying  its  power  to  do  our  work, 
but  also  by  supplying  the  means  for  extending  knowledge  itself,  al- 
most to  the  infinite.    And  the  point  to  which  this  history  returns 


2o6    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

again  and  again,  is  that  even  the  genius  of  a  Plato  could  hardly 
anticipate  the  merest  fraction  of  the  results  to  be  obtained  by  the 
slow,  minute  processes  of  the  mechanism  of  science. 

It  is  perhaps  fortunate  for  us  that  we  are  spared  the  temptation 
of  tracing  these  suggestions  in  subsequent  Hellenic  historians^ 
by  the  fragmentary  character  of  the  literary  remains  of  most  of 
those  who  might  offer  themselves  for  such  a  study.  We  shall  have 
it  before  us,  however,  as  we  turn  to  Rome.  It  remains  now  for  us 
merely  to  pass  in  rapid  review  the  work  of  the  more  outstanding 
figures  among  those  gifted  Greeks  who  supplied  the  cultured  world 
of  their  time  with  the  kind  of  histories  it  demanded 

The  history  of  Polybius  was  continued  by  the  Stoic  Posidonius, 
who  applied  himself  to  the  task  with  somewhat  the  same  apprecia- 
tion of  the  distortions  of  narrative  due  to  rhetorical  adornment  as 
Polybius  himself.  He  had  also,  like  Polybius,  travelled  widely  on 
the  outskirts  of  the  known  world,  from  Spain  to  Rhodes  and  Syria 
and  wrote  voluminously  on  all  kinds  of  topics.  His  Geography 
and  his  History  are  the  only  works  of  interest  here.  The  latter 
was  begun  in  74  B.C.  and  continued  the  universal  history  of  Polyb- 
ius, in  fifty-two  books,  from  144  B.C.  to  the  Dictatorship  of  Sulla 
in  82  B.C.  It  was  a  notable  performance,  and  although  Posidonius 
does  not  belong  with  the  rhetoricians,  but  in  the  succession  of 
Timaeus  and  Polybius,  Cicero  deferred  to  him  as  to  a  master  of 
style,  when  trying  himself  to  write  the  account  of  his  own  consulate 
in  Greek.  The  modern  critic  has  not  less  praise  for  this  Stoic  his- 
torian, his  learning,  and  his  critical  capacity.^ 

Strabo  (c.  64  B.C.-19  a.d.),  the  great  geographer  was  also  a 
continuator  of  Polybius,  and  wrote  as  well  some  Historical  Memoirs 
which  included  a  treatment  of  the  deeds  of  Alexander.  The 
Geography,  too,  had  a  historical  introduction  covering  the  history 
of  geography  and  the  work  of  geographers  to  his  own  day,  —  almost 
our  only  source  for  such  important  figures  as  Eratosthenes.  More- 
over, historians  are  so  much  in  evidence  as  authorities  in  the  Geog- 
raphy that  it  may  almost  be  said  to  embody  the  descriptive  phase 
of  antique  historiography,  that  phase  so  evident  in  the  excursus  of 

^  Cf.  Cicero,  Epistularum  Ad  Atticum  Liber  Secundus,  Letter  I,  Sects,  i  and  2; 
H.  Peter,  Wahrheii  iind  Kunsi,  pp.  265-270. 


LATER   GREEK   HISTORIANS  207 

Herodotus,  But  Strabo  has  a  further  interest  for  us.  His  method, 
in  Hne  with  the  traditions  we  have  just  seen  maintained  by  Posi- 
donius,  was  to  cite  largely  from  his  authorities  and  so  preserve 
fragments  of  them  for  his  less  scholarly  readers  and,  in  part,  for 
us.  A  travelled  Greek,  he  also  knew  Rome,  and  is  an  outstanding 
example  of  those  "philosophers,"  —  for  so  he  is  termed  by  Plutarch, 
—  who  held  to  the  saner  lines  of  criticism  and  respected  facts. 
He  was  more  a  scholar  than  a  historian,  as  his  predilection  for 
geography  indicates.  The  events  of  history  require  an  added 
dimension.  It  is  easier  to  describe  the  world  in  space  than  in 
time,^  and  for  that  great  synthesis  which  recreates  in  intelligence 
the  happenings  of  chance  he  lacked  the  full  stature  of  genius.  On 
the  other  hand  it  was  to  his  credit  that  he  did  not  try  to  reach  that 
synthesis  by  the  facile  use  of  words  and  phrases,  to  which  a  rhetori- 
cian would  have  yielded. 

It  was  just  this  synthesis,  in  the  widest  possible  sense,  which 
Diodorus  Siculus  (c.  80-29  B.C.),  Strabo's  older  contemporary,  had 
tried  to  reach  in  his  general  history  (Bibliotheca  Historica)  in  forty 
books;  tried  and  failed,  for  the  chief  value  of  his  work  to  us  is 
in  the  fragments  of  sources  which  he  built  into  it,  not  the  bold  uni- 
fying conception  of  which  he  was  chiefly  proud.  He  began  with  the 
mythical  accounts  of  ancient  Egypt  and  the  Orient,  and  carried 
the  story  of  Greece  and  Sicily  down  to  the  close.  But  —  fortu- 
nately for  the  preservation  of  his  sources  —  he  did  not  see  the 
interconnection  of  events  and  simply  made  a  sort  of  world-chronicle 
out  of  a  series  of  chronicles  of  different  countries,  cutting  and 
trimming  the  authorities  to  meet  the  exigencies,  but  still  leaving 
them  to  substantiate  the  narrative.  To  this  clumsy,  but  imposing, 
monument  of  erudition  Diodorus  added  some  of  the  unreaHties  of 
rhetoric ;  and  it  is  hardly  to  be  wondered  at  if  he  failed  to  receive 
the  attention  of  those  of  his  day  for  whom  he  wrote.  It  was  only 
later,  when  Christian  scholars  in  the  third  century  began  to  look 

1  In  this  connection  mention  should  be  made  of  those  Greek  chronographers 
who  drew  together  comparative  lists  of  events  in  world  chronicles.  The  basis  of  chro- 
nology, laid  by  Eratosthenes  of  Alexandria  in  the  third  century  B.C.,  was  built  upon  by 
Apollodorus  of  Athens,  whose  four  books  of  chronicles  reached  down  to  119  B.C.  Then 
Castor  of  Rhodes  gathered  the  threads  together  into  a  synchronistic  table  or  "canon," 
ending  with  the  year  61  B.C.  Castor's  chronicle  was  destined  to  prove  of  great  impor- 
tance later  to  the  Christian  chronologists.     He  is  plentifully  in  evidence  in  Eusebius. 


2o8    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

back  across  the  pagan  past  for  an  account  of  the  whole  world,  and 
not  of  Rome  merely,  that  Diodorus  proved  to  be  of  enough  impor- 
tance to  secure  the  preservation  of  part  of  his  world  history. 

It  was  in  the  line  of  these  great  world  histories  that  Nicholas  of 
Damascus  wrote  the  one  hundred  forty-four  books  of  universal  his- 
tory to  which  reference  has  been  made  above  in  the  chapter  on  Jose- 
phus.  The  favorite  of  Herod  the  Great  knew  how  to  win  as  well 
the  favor  of  Augustus,  and  his  detailed  account  of  contemporary 
events  was  apparently  not  lacking  in  rhetorical  polish.  But  his 
work  was  more  a  compilation,  like  that  of  Diodorus,  than  an  in- 
dependent history. 

By  a  strange  coincidence  it  was  the  city  of  Herodotus  which 
produced  the  historian  who  most  vitiated  the  scientific  possibilities 
of  this  kind  of  scholarship  by  acceptance  of  the  standards  of  rhetoric. 
Dionysius  of  Hahcarnassus,  born  about  the  middle  of  the  first 
century  B.C.,  came  to  Rome  in  the  year  30  B.C.,  and  as  he  proudly 
relates  in  the  introduction  to  his  Archceologia  spent  twenty- two 
years  in  preparation  for  his  great  work,  which  was  published 
in  the  year  7  a.d.  He  moved  in  the  best  circles  of  Rome,  and  it 
was  his  ambition  to  rival  Livy  by  the  wealth  of  his  detailed  in- 
formation concerning  the  Roman  antiquities.  In  addition,  he 
tried  to  satisfy  Greek  pride  by  making  much  of  the  Greek  origins 
of  Rome.  Two  such  divergent  purposes  could  be  welded  into  a 
single  history  only  by  the  greatest  creative  capacity  upon  the  part 
of  the  historian  ;  and  instead  of  this,  Dionysius  brought  a  mediocre 
talent  and  the  devices  of  rhetoric.  Even  these  devices  were  not 
all  his  own ;  for  he  embodied  expressions  from  the  Greek  classics, 
where  they  could  aptly  apply  to  his  narrative,  seeking  effect 
above  all,  and,  as  is  generally  the  case  in  such  instance,  failing  to 
achieve  it. 

Under  the  Roman  Empire,  Greek  scholarship  continued  at  its 
various  tasks ;  and  after  the  golden  age  of  Latin  literature  was  over, 
Greek  became  once  more,  under  the  Antonines,  the  medium  for 
culture.  Into  the  details  of  this  story  we  shall  not  enter ;  but  we 
should  at  least  recall  in  passing  the  lasting  importance  to  history 
of  Plutarch's  Lives.  Few  books  have  done  more  to  determine 
the  reputation  of  historical  characters  for  subsequent  ages.     The 


LATER   GREEK   HISTORIANS  209 

forty-six  Parallel  Lives  are  arranged  in  pairs,  mainly  Roman  and 
Greek,  and  the  personalities  they  depict  are  typical  of  the  times 
and  customs  of  their  environment  or  of  their  own  professions 
and  careers.  There  are  generals  and  statesmen,  patriots  and  law- 
givers ;  a  gallery  of  the  great  figures  whose  names  were  already 
more  or  less  legendary  and  who  now  became  fixed  in  the  imagination 
of  the  world  as  real,  living  characters.  Plutarch  was  a  native  of 
Boeotia,  and,  although  he  travelled  widely,  he  seems  to  have  writ- 
ten his  biographies  after  his  return  to  the  little  town  of  Chaeronea 
where  he  was  born.  It  is  a  striking  fact  that,  writing  as  he  does 
in  this  isolated  village,  he  shows  a  larger  and  more  catholic  mind 
than  his  brilliant  contemporary,  Tacitus,  writing  at  Rome.  This 
is  a  point  to  which  we  shall  revert  later,  when  we  come  to  see  the 
influences  which  made  for  provinciaHsm  at  Rome  under  the  Caesars ; 
but  it  is  well  to  recognize  here  that  in  Plutarch  we  have  a  genuine 
"historian"  in  the  first  sense  of  the  word,  an  inquirer  on  the  paths 
of  truth,  —  as  interested  in  comparative  religion  as  in  morals,  and 
lacking  only  in  the  social  and  political  interests  which  bind  these 
elements  of  personality  and  mystery  into  the  complex  processes  of 
society,  and  so  make  history. 

Finally,  passing  by  such  notable  figures  asAppianof  Alexandria, 
of  whose  accounts  of  the  various  provinces  of  the  Empire  in  twenty- 
four  books,  written  under  Trajan  and  Hadrian,  almost  the  half 
has  been  preserved,  or  Arrian  of  Bithynia,  the  favorite  of  Hadrian 
and  the  Antonines,  the  worthy  disciple  of  Epictetus  and  historian 
of  the  Persian  wars,  we  come  to  the  last  of  the  list  in  Cassius  Die 
Coccejanus,  the  historian  of  Rome,  of  the  third  century.  He  was 
born  in  Nicaea  in  Bithynia  about  155  a.d.,  and  passed  a  long 
life  in  high  offices  of  state,  consul,  proconsul  of  Africa,  legate  to 
Dalmatia  and  Pannonia.  He  died  about  the  year  235.  His 
history  of  Rome,  in  eighty  books,  was  divided  into  decades  after 
the  manner  in  which  Livy's  was  then  preserved,  and  it  stretched 
over  the  whole  field  from  the  arrival  of  ^neas  in  Italy  to  the 
reign  of  Alexander  Severus.  It  was  a  work  of  long  researches, 
ten  years  spent  in  collecting  the  materials,  twelve  more  in  com- 
position, and  was  to  the  Greek-speaking  East  much  what  Livy  was 
to  the  Latin  West.^     It  expounded  the  great  theme  of  Roman 

^  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit  und  Kunst,  p.  396. 


2IO    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

history  in  the  spirit  of  a  Roman  ojSicial.  At  the  close,  therefore, 
Greek  historiography  fused  and  lost  itself  in  that  theme  of  empire 
which  was  to  perpetuate  its  outlook,  however  changed  and  dimmed, 
in  a  new  state  creation  at  Byzantium. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  fragments  of  Posidonius  are  to  be  found  in  C.  Miiller,  Fragmenta 
Historicorum  Grcccorum  (5  vols.,  1841-1873),  Vol.  Ill,  pp.  245-296.  The 
most  recent  Teubner  text  of  Strabo's  Geographica  is  that  of  A.  Meineke  (3  vois., 
1 904-1 909).  The  translation  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  is  by  H.  L.  Jones 
(8  vols.,  Vol.  I,  1917).  There  is  an  edition  of  Diodorus  Siculus  by  F.  Vogel 
and  C.  T.  Fischer  (5  vols.,  Teubner,  1888-1906) ;  a  translation  by  J.  Fox  has 
been  promised  by  the  Loeb  Classical  Library.  The  fragments  of  Nicholas  of 
Damascus  are  preserved  in  C.  Miiller,  Fragmenta  Historicorum  Grczcorum, 
Vol.  Ill,  pp.  343-464  ;  Vol.  IV,  pp.  661-668,  and  in  L.  Dindorf,  Historici  GrcBci 
Minores  (2  vols.,  t8"70-i87i),  Vol.  I,  pp.  1-153.  The  text  of  Dionysius  of 
Halicarnassus  has  been  edited  by  C.  Jacoby,  H.  Usener  and  L.  Radermacher 
(6  vols.,  Teubner,  1885-1905) ;  a  translation  of  Dionysius'  treatise.  On  Literary 
Composition,  has  been  made  by  W.  R.  Roberts  (1910). 

There  are  editions  of  Plutaich's  Vitae  Parallelae  by  C.  Sintenis  (4  vols., 
1839-1846;  5  vols.,  Teubner,  1873-1875)  and  by  C.  Lindskog  and  K.  Ziegler 
(Teubner,  Vols.  I-III,  1914-1915).  The  "Dryden  Plutarch"  revised  by  A.  H. 
Clough  is  the  version  used  in  Everyman's  Library  (3  vols.,  1910).  There  is 
also  the  translation  of  Plutarch's  works  by  W.  Goodwin  and  A.  H.  Clough 
(10  vols.,  1914-1921).  Naturally  there  is  more  literature  on  Plutarch  than  can 
be  noted  here. 

The  Teubner  editions  of  Appian  are  by  I.  Bekker  (2  vols.,  1852-1853)  and 
L.  Mendelssohn  (2  vols.,  1879-1881) ;  there  is  a  partial  edition  by  P.  Viereck 
(Vol.  II,  1905).  Translations  of  the  text  are  by  J.  L.  Strachan-Davidson, 
Appian's  Civil  Wars  (Bk.  I,  1902)  and  by  H.  White,  Appian's  Roman  History, 
in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  (4  vols.,  1912-1913). 

For  the  text  of  Arrian  there  is  the  edition  by  A.  G.  Roos  (ed.  maior.  Vol.  I, 
1907).  There  is  a  translation,  The  Anabasis  of  Alexander  and  Indica,  byE.  J. 
Chinnock  (1893).  The  text  of  Dio  Cassius  is  edited  by  J.  Melber  (2  vols., 
Teubner,  1890-1894)  and  by  U.  P.  Boissevain  (3  vols.,  1895-1901).  A  lengthy 
list  of  publications  on  Dio  accompanies  H.  B.  Foster's  translation,  Dio's  Rome; 
an  Historical  Narrative  .  .  .  (6  vols.,  1905-1906),  which  formed  the  basis  for 
the  edition  by  E.  Gary  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  (9  vols.,  Vols.  I-VI, 
1914-1917)- 


SECTION  IV 
ROMAN  HISTORY 

CHAPTER  XVIII 
HISTORY  AT  ROME;    ORATORY  AND   POETRY 

If  politics  be  the  main  theme  of  history  in  the  antique  world, 
it  might  seem  reasonable  to  look  for  the  greatest  historians  among 
the  people  who  achieved  the  greatest  political  creation,  the  Romans. 
But  although  Rome  furnished  the  lesson  in  practical  statesmanship, 
both  for  antiquity  and  for  succeeding  ages,  its  achievement  in 
history-writing  is,  upon  the  whole,  poor  and  disappointing.  It  was 
a  Greek,  Polybius,  who,  as  we  have  seen,  wrote  in  the  city  of  the 
Scipios  the  story  of  the  emergence  of  the  Latin  people  upon  the 
theatre  of  world  empire.  Although  Sallust,  Livy  and  Tacitus 
rise  to  the  height  of  national  monuments,  —  Tacitus  even  higher 
still, — yet  the  two  outstanding  figures  of  Roman  Hterature,  through- 
out the  Middle  Ages  as  in  Modern  Times,  are  Vergil,  the  epic  poet, 
and  Cicero,  the  philosophic  orator.  There  is  a  real  significance 
in  this ;  for  in  them,  rather  than  in  the  historians,  are  typified  the 
interests  and  attitudes  of  the  intellectual  Romans  themselves,  — • 
in  them  and  in  that  other  still  greater  creation  of  the  Latin  genius, 
the  Roman  law.  The  extent  of  the  failure  of  the  Romans  in  history- 
writing,  when  they  had  a  theme  the  like  of  which  had  never  been 
even  dreamed  of  in  the  world  before,  is  obscured  by  the  individual 
genius  of  Tacitus.  But  from  his  time,  —  excepting  Suetonius,  who 
was  partly  contemporary,  —  to  the  fall  of  the  empire  at  the  end  of 
the  fourth  century,  when  a  simple,  straightforward  soldier,  Ammi- 
anus  MarcelHnus,  told  of  the  wars  on  the  frontier  and  the  troubles 
at  home,  there  "was  not  one  author  of  talent  to  preserve  in  Latin 
the  memory  of  the  events  that  stirred  the  world  of  that  period ; 
but  it  was  a  Bithynian  .  .  .  ,  Dion  Cassius  of  Nicaea,  who,  under 
the  Severi,  narrated  the  history  of  the  Roman  people."^ 

^  F.  Cumont,  The  Oriental  Religions  in  Roman  Paganism,  p.  7,  where  the  debt  of 
Rome  to  the  Orient  is  brilliantly  summarized. 


212    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Our  sense  of  loss  is  probably  lessened  by  the  poor  consolation 
that  had  a  second  Tacitus  appeared  and  devoted  himself  to  the 
larger  theme  disclosed  by  the  passing  centuries,  he  could  hardly 
have  succeeded,  however  great  his  genius,  in  deahng  alone  with  so 
vast  a  subject.  History,  as  has  become  clear  from  our  survey  of 
Greece,  differs  absolutely  from  poetry  or  philosophy  in  that  it 
needs  an  apparatus  for  investigation.  Philosophy  may  get  a  new 
grip  upon  the  questions  of  reality  from  a  Descartes  divesting  him- 
self —  or  trying  to  do  so  —  of  the  inheritance  of  past  systems. 
But  the  historian  can  never  work  in  isolation.  The  conditions 
under  which  Thucydides  wrote  justify  the  editor  of  the  merest 
selections  for  college  text-books  in  revising  his  story  of  the  Pelopon- 
nesian  war,  and  since  the  Romans  failed  to  develop  historical 
apparatus  any  more  adequate  for  their  purpose  than  that  of  the 
Greeks  was  for  Thucydides,  we  should,  at  best,  have  had  the  same 
kind  of  exploit  over  again.  From  Thucydides  to  Ammianus 
MarcelHnus  stretch  almost  eight  hundred  years,  during  which  ran 
the  whole  drama  of  the  classic  world.  Yet  httle,  if  any,  progress 
was  made  in  the  work  of  the  historian.  On  the  other  hand,  from  the 
day  of  Niebuhr,  hardly  a  century  ago,  to  the  present,  the  whole 
perspective  of  that  antiquity  has  been  remade,  and  a  multitude  of 
facts  established  which  the  antique  historians  should  have  known 
but  had  no  way  of  finding  out.  Surely  no  greater  proof  is  needed 
that  history  to  be  adequate  differs  from  the  rest  of  literature  in 
that  it  is  more  science  than  art,  a  social  rather  than  an  individual 
product. 

The  sense  of  the  mediocre  character  of  the  historical  writings 
of  Romans  during  the  Republic,  is  brought  out  by  Cicero  in  the 
one  treatment  of  history  and  its  possibilities  which  has  come  down 
to  us  in  Latin  literature.  The  setting  is  significant,  for  it  occurs  in 
his  treatise.  On  the  Orator,^  an  imaginary  dialogue,  placed  by 
Cicero  in  the  Tusculan  villa  of  Crassus  in  the  year  91  B.C.  The 
principal  disputants  were  the  two  great  orators  Lucius  Licinius 
Crassus  and  Marcus  Antonius.^    The  passage  which  deals  with 

^  Cicero,  De  Oratore,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XII.  It  was  published  by  Cicero  55  B.C.  The 
extracts  quoted  here  are  from  the  translation  by  J.  S.  Watson  in  Bohn's  Classical 
Library,  a  somewhat  literal  rendering. 

^  Grandfather  of  the  triumvir. 


HISTORY  AT  ROME;    ORATORY  AND   POETRY     213 

history  occurs  in  a  most  incidental  way.  Antonius  has  been 
speaking  of  the  fact  that  no  special  training  is  needed  by  the  orator 
to  quote  ofl&cial  documents  in  his  speeches,  —  a  point  with  which 
his  interlocutor,  Catulus,^  agrees : 

"Well,  then,  to  proceed,"  said  Antonius,  "what  sort  of  orator,  or  how  great 
a  master  of  language,  do  you  think  it  requires  to  write  history?"  "If  to  write 
it  as  the  Greeks  have  written,  a  man  of  the  highest  powers,"  said  Catulus; 
"if  as  our  own  countrymen,  there  is  no  need  of  an  orator;  it  is  sufficient  for  the 
writer  to  tell  truth." 

This  depreciation  of  the  old  Roman  historiographers  —  for  so 
mere  truth  telling  is  regarded — is  apparently  brought  in  to  indicate 
the  general  opinion  in  which  they  were  held  in  Cicero's  day.  It  draws 
from  Antonius,  however,  the  following  justification  of  the  Romans 
by  way  of  a  sHght  historical  survey.  The  most  noticeable  point 
in  this  survey  is  the  recognition  upon  the  part  of  Cicero,  —  for  of 
course  it  is  Cicero  who  speaks,  —  that  the  development  of  historiog- 
raphy in  Greece  and  Rome  took  place  along  exactly  similar  Hues : 

"But,"  rejoined  Antonius,  "that  you  may  not  despise  those  of  our  own 
country,  the  Greeks  themselves  too  wrote  at  first  just  like  our  Cato,  and  Pictor, 
and  Piso.  For  history  was  nothing  else  but  a  compilation  of  annals ;  and  accord- 
ingly, for  the  sake  of  preserving  the  memory  of  public  events,  the  pontifex 
maximus  used  to  commit  to  writing  the  occurrences  of  every  year,  from  the 
earliest  period  of  Roman  affairs  to  the  time  of  the  Pontifex  Publius  Mucius,'' 
and  had  them  engrossed  on  white  tablets,  which  he  set  forth  as  a  register  in 
his  own  house,  so  that  all  the  people  had  liberty  to  inspect  it ;  and  these  records 
are  yet  called  the  Great  Annals.  This  mode  of  writing  many  have  adopted, 
and,  without  any  ornaments  of  style,  have  left  behind  them  simple  chronicles 
of  times,  persons,  places,  and  events.  Such,  therefore,  as  were  Pherecydes, 
Hellanicus,  Acusilas,  and  many  others  among  the  Greeks,  are  Cato,  and  Pictor, 
and  Piso  with  us,  who  neither  understand  how  composition  is  to  be  adorned 
(for  ornaments  of  style  have  been  but  recently  introduced  among  us),  and, 
provided  what  they  related  can  be  understood,  think  brevity  of  expression 
the  only  merit.  .  .  ." 

We  shall  revCTt  later  to  this  account  of  the  Annales  Maximi, 
for  it  is  a  prime  source,  but  what  interests  us  here  is  to  follow  the 
clue  which  Cicero  offers  as  to  the  reasons  for  the  mediocrity  of 
Roman  history  writing.     His  whole  interest  is  in  the  style  of  the 

1  Consul  with  Marius,  at  the  time  of  the  battle  with  the  Cimbri. 

2  Publius  Mucius  Scaevola.     Vide  infra,  Chap.  XIX. 


214    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

writers.  The  first  step  forward  was,  in  his  eyes,  when  Antipater, 
the  instructor  di  the  orator  Crassus,  adorned  his  narrative  with 
rhetoric.  Admittedly  Antipater  overdid  it,^  but  yet  history  at 
Rome  did  not  amount  to  much  before  his  time.  The  implication 
is  clear,  and  is  developed  by  Antonius.  History  is  an  art,  and  as 
such  is  to  be  compared  with  oratory ;  and  the  point  is  made  that 
the  Romans  have  failed  to  do  it  justice  because  they  have  con- 
centrated too  excessively  upon  forensic  eloquence : 

"It  is  far  from  being  wonderful,"  said  Antonius,  "if  history  has  not  yet 
made  a  figure  in  our  language ;  for  none  of  our  countrymen  study  eloquence 
except  to  display  it  in  pleading  and  in  the  forum ;  whereas  among  the  Greeks, 
the  most  eloquent  men,  wholly  unconnected  with  public  pleading,  sought 
to  gain  renown  in  other  ways,  such  as  writing  history ;  for  of  Herodotus  him- 
self, who  first  lent  distinction  to  this  kind  of  writing,  we  hear  that  he  was 
never  engaged  in  pleading;  yet  his  eloquence  is  so  great  as  to  delight  me 
extremely,  as  far  as  I  can  understand  Greek.  After  him,  in  my  opinion, 
Thucydides  has  certainly  surpassed  all  historians  in  the  art  of  composition ; 
for  he  has  such  a  wealth  of  material,  that  he  almost  equals  the  number  of  his 
words  by  the  number  of  his  thoughts.  He  too,  so  far  as  we  know,  although 
he  was  engaged  in  public  affairs,  was  not  one  of  those  who  engaged  in  pleading ; 
and  he  is  said  to  have  written  his  books  at  a  time  when  he  was  removed  from 
all  civil  employments,  and,  as  usually  happened  to  every  eminent  man  at  Athens, 
was  driven  into  banishment.  He  was  followed  by  Philistus  of  Syracuse,  who, 
living  in  great  familiarity  with  the  tyrant  Dionysius,  spent  his  leisure  in  writing 
history,  and,  as  I  think,  principally  imitated  Thucydides.  Afterwards,  two 
men  of  great  genius,  Theopompus  and  Ephorus,  coming  from  what  we  may  call 
the  noblest  school  of  rhetoric,  applied  themselves  to  history  by  the  persuasions 
of  their  master  Isocrates,  and  never  attended  to  pleading  at  all.  At  last 
historians  arose  also  among  the  philosophers;  first  Xenophon,  the  follower 
of  Socrates,  and  afterwards  Callisthenes,  the  pupil  of  Aristotle  and  companion 
of  Alexander.  The  latter  wrote  in  an  almost  rhetorical  manner ;  the  former 
used  a  milder  strain  of  language,  which  has  not  the  animation  of  oratory,  but, 
though  perhaps  less  energetic,  is,  as  it  seems  to  me,  much  more  pleasing. 
Timaeus,  the  last  of  all  these,  but,  as  far  as  I  can  judge,  by  far  the  most 
learned,  and  richest  in  subject  matter  and  variety  of  thought,  and  not  un- 
polished in  style,  brought  a  large  store  of  eloquence  to  this  kind  of  writing^ 
but  no  experience  in  pleading  causes."  ^ 

There  is  a  good  deal  to  think  about  in  this  slight  sketch.  It  is 
a  chapter  of  the  history  of  History  in  miniature,  the  first  and  only 

>  Cicero,  op.  ciL,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XIII. 

^  Cicero,  De  Oratore,  Bk.  II,  Chaps.  XIII-XIV.     (Translation  based  on  Watson's.) 


HISTORY  AT  ROME;  ORATORY  AND   POETRY    215 

one  in  Latin  literature.  Yet  it  deals  with  Greeks !  Rome  had  as  yet 
produced  no  such  line  of  great  historians.  Sallust,  Livy  and  Tacitus 
were  yet  to  come.  Cicero  knew  only  one  Latin  name  to  match 
the  Greeks,  the  elder  Cato ;  ^  and  in  judging  him  he  used  Hellenic 
standards.  He  recognized  that  the  field  of  history  is  one  by  itself, 
and  he  had  a  real  appreciation  of  its  dignity,  but  after  all,  it  did 
not  interest  him  as  did  philosophy.  He  did  not  attempt  to  transmit 
to  Rome  the  ideals  of  Thucydides,  as  he  did  those  of  the  Platonic 
school  of  thinkers  to  whom  he  owed  so  much.^  Thucydides  is 
"a  wise  and  dignified  narrator  of  facts,"  but  he  ''was  never  ac- 
counted an  orator,"  and  used  hard  and  obscure  sentences  in  his 
speeches;  as  for  Xenophon,  though  "his  style  is  sweeter  than 
honey,"  it  is  "as  unlike  as  possible  to  the  noisy  style  of  the  forum." 
It  is  therefore  a  mistake,  says  Cicero,  to  imitate,  as  some  do,  the 
one  or  the  other  in  the  training  of  an  orator.^ 

Once  having  got  our  bearings,  that  history  is  a  useful  art  and 
that  its  chief  use  is  to  furnish  inspiration  or  "points"  to  the  orator, 
it  is  clear  that  rules  should  be  at  hand  for  its  production,  rules  that 
the  orator  might  readily  apply.  Yet  no  such  treatment  can  be 
found  among  the  works  on  rhetoric ;  and  this  leads  Cicero  to  supply 
the  need,  in  an  oft-quoted  passage : 

"Who  is  ignorant  that  the  first  law  in  writing  history  is  that  the  historian 
must  not  dare  to  say  anything  that  is  false,  and  the  next,  that  he  must  dare  to 
tell  the  truth  ?  Also  that  there  must  be  no  suspicion  of  partiality  or  of  personal 
animosity  ?  These  fundamental  rules  are  doubtless  universally  known.  The 
superstructure  depends  on  facts  and  style.  The  course  of  facts  {rerum  ratio) 
requires  attention  to  order  of  time  and  descriptions  of  countries ;  and  since,  in 
great  affairs,  such  as  are  worthy  of  remembrance,  we  look  first  for  the  designs, 
then  the  actions,  and  afterwards  the  results,  it  should  also  show  what  designs  the 
writer  approves ;  and  with  regard  to  the  actions,  not  only  what  was  done  or  said, 
but  in  what  manner ;  and  when  the  result  is  stated,  all  the  causes  contributing  to 
it,  whether  arising  from  accident,  wisdom,  or  temerity.  As  to  the  characters 
concerned,  not  only  their  acts  should  be  set  forth  but  the  life  and  manners  of  at 

1  Vide  infra,  Chap.  XIX. 

^  Cf.  Cicero,  Orator,  Chaps.  III-IV :  "I  confess  that  I  have  been  made  an  orator 
(if  indeed  I  am  one  at  all,  or  such  as  I  am),  not  by  the  workshop  of  the  rhetoricians, 
but  by  the  works  of  the  Academy."  It  is  philosophy  that  stirs  the  imagination  of  the 
great  orator,  and  imagination  is  the  main  thing  in  eloquence  (not  facts!). 

^  Cicero,  Orator,  Chap.  IX.  The  admission  of  this  vogue  is  as  significant  as 
Cicero's  comment. 


2i6    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

least  those  eminent  in  reputation  and  dignity.  The  sort  of  language  and 
character  of  style  to  be  observed  must  be  regiolar  and  continuous,  flowing  with 
a  kind  of  equable  smoothness,  without  the  roughness  of  judicial  pleadings, 
and  the  sharp-pointed  sentences  used  at  the  bar.  Concerning  all  these  nu- 
merous and  important  points,  there  are  no  rules,  do  you  observe,  to  be  found 
in  the  treatises  of  the  rhetoricians.  .  .  . "  * 

It  is  perhaps  somewhat  confusing,  in  an  introductory  chapter, 
to  have  the  doors  thus  thrown  open  upon  the  central  theme.  But 
Cicero  reveals  more  than  he  intends,  and  one  sees  from  these  slight 
sketches  what  there  was  in  the  Roman  attitude  toward  history 
which  determined  its  whole  character.  Two  things  stand  out :  the 
practical  bent  of  the  Roman,  and  his  Greek  education.  History 
is  an  aid  to  statesmen  and  orators,  furnishing  examples  of  actions 
to  emulate  or  avoid,  or  illustrations  for  speeches,  which  the  user 
—  if  not  the  historian  himself  ^  —  may  improve  to  suit  the  needs 
of  an  idea  or  a  phrase.^  Truth  for  truth's  sake  is  all  right  in  its 
way ;  but  truth  that  is  apt  and  to  the  point,  in  debate  or  in  practice, 
is  worth  more  to  a  Roman.  Now  history  abounds  in  truths  that 
may  be  applied ;  the  trouble  is  that  in  applying  them  one  is  Hkely 
to  destroy  the  nexus  of  events  and  lose  the  sense  of  historical 
relationships,  of  that  process,  in  short,  which  gives  meaning  to  the 
whole.^  Pragmatic  history,  in  spite  of  the  plea  of  Polybius,^  is 
dangerous  business.  The  practical  Roman,  however,  was  not  so 
much  interested  in  any  other  kind.  And  his  native  bent  was  not 
corrected  by  his  Greek  education.  "Greece  captive,  captured 
Rome,"  as  the  saying  ran.  And  the  Greeks  who  achieved  this 
cultural  triumph  were  the  grammarians  and  rhetoricians  who 
taught  the  Latins  the  arts  of  elegance  and  sophistication,^    The 

^  Cicero,  De  Oratore,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XV.     (Translation  based  on  Watson's.) 

"  Cf.  Quintilian's  dictum,  De  Institutione  Oratoria,  Bk.  X,  Chap,  i,  Sect.  31 
"  Historia  ....  scribitur  ad  narrandum  non  ad  probandum." 

^  Cf.  Cicero,  Brutus,  Chap.  XI.  "  It  is  the  privilege  of  rhetoricians  to  exceed  the 
truth  of  history  that  they  may  have  the  opportunity  of  embellishing  the  fate  of  their 
heroes." 

^  In  other  words,  destroy  the  history.     Vide  supra,  Chap.  I,  for  definition. 

^  It  would  be  interesting  to  speculate  as  to  how  much  of  Polybius'  pragmatism  is  a 
reflection  of  Roman  influences. 

^  Philosophy  proper  was  best  to  be  studied  by  travel,  especially  by  going  to 
Athens,  much  as  many  Americans  have  gone  to  Europe  for  their  post-graduate  studies. 

Cf.  H.  Peter,  Die  geschichtliche  Litteratur  iibcr  die  ramische  Kaiscrzcil  bis  Thcodosius 
I  und  ihre  Quellen  (2  vols.,  1897),  Vol.  I,  Chap.  I  {Die  Gcschichte  in  dcr  Jugendbildung.) 


HISTORY  AT   ROME;    ORATORY  AND   POETRY      217 

effect  of  Greece  upon  Rome  was  seen  in  history  as  in  poetry  and 
in  religion,  a  constant  influence  reaching  all  the  way  from  the 
transformation  of  its  early  legends  to  embellishments  of  style  in 
the  later  writers. 

The  legendary  element  in  Roman  history  has  little  place  in  a 
history,  for  it  is  the  most  unhistorical  product  imaginable,  being 
invention  rather  than  folk-myths,^  and  supplanting  the  simple 
annals  of  the  poor  by  suggestions  of  strange  adventures  that  linked 
the  origins  of  Rome  with  the  great  days  of  Troy.  To  the  Roman 
there  was  Httle  worthy  of  record  in  the  humble  story  of  his  little 
farmer-state,  strugghng  with  its  neighbors  of  Latium.  There  are 
no  contemporary  legends  of  the  long  period  of  history  in  which 
Rome  grew  from  a  group  of  villages  on  the  hills  by  the  swampy 
back-water  of  the  Tiber,  to  be  the  chief  city  of  the  western  plain. 
Contemporary  data  begin  only  when  Rome  was  already  con- 
quering the  Mediterranean.^  And  as  both  Polybius  and  Livy 
"recognized  as  the  chief  principle  of  historical  criticism  that  there 
can  be  no  trustworthy  and  sincere  history  where  there  have  not 
been  contemporary  historians"  ^  we  may  frankly  and  shortly  dismiss, 
as  not  germane  to  our  subject,  the  legendary  heritage  which  Rome 
possessed  from  its  earhest  days.  It  remained  for  a  Wissowa  or  a 
Fowler  in  our  own  day  to  recover,  from  the  fragmentary  remains 
of  cult  and  myth,  of  law  and  custom,  the  hving  picture  of  that 
quaint  if  unheroic  life  of  wattled  hut  and  market-place  which  left 
its  traces  on  the  Roman  character,  but  which  the  glamour  of 
Greece  and  of  Rome's  own  great  career  obscured  until  the  critics 
of  the  nineteenth  century  began  their  destructive  and  reconstruc- 
tive work.* 

1  C/.  W.  Soltau,  Die  Anfdnge  der  roemischen  Geschichtschreibung  (1909),  pp.  1-4, 
Only  the  scientific  mind  has  a  sense  of  the  significance  of  the  obscure.  So  long  as 
history  is  considered  as  primarily  one  of  the  literary  arts  such  things  escape  it. 

^  Ibid.,  p.  228. 

3  E.  Pais,  Ancient  Legends  of  Roman  History  (1905),  p.  12. 

^  This  is  not  the  place  for  a  comprehensive  survey  of  the  remaking  of  early  Roman 
history.  The  groundwork  of  historical  criticism  was  laid  by  Louis  de  Beaufort,  in  his 
Dissertation  stir  I'incertitiide  des  cinq  premiers  siecles  de  Vhistoire  romaine  (1738).  B.  G. 
Niebuhr's  great  work  is  still  of  absorbing  interest.  The  first  two  volumes  of  his 
Rimische  Geschichte  appeared  in  181 2,  a  third  in  1832,  and  his  Lectures  in  1846.  The 
reaction  against  his  negative  criticism  has  generally  taken  the  line  that  the  growth 


2i8    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

If  the  legends  of  early  Rome  were  unreal,  even  as  legends,  we 
need  hardly  delay  over  the  way  in  which  the  epic  poets  immortal- 
ized them.  And  yet,  this  was  history  to  Romans,  almost,  if  not 
quite,  as  the  Homeric  poems  were  to  Greeks.  Indeed,  the  epos 
of  Rome  was  a  recurring  echo  of  the  great  voice  of  Homer.  It  was 
not  necessarily  due  to  any  inherent  weakness  of  the  Roman  imagina- 
tion, as  is  often  supposed ;  nor  to  any  abstract  nature  of  the  ItaHan 
gods ;  ^  it  was  rather  due  to  the  absence  of  a  great  adventure. 
There  was  no  racial  sense  among  the  dwellers  of  Latium  as  among 
the  Greeks;  they  had  no  "barbarian"  world  against  which  to 
sharpen  their  national  consciousness.  Moreover,  they  were  con- 
quered by  Etruscans  and  the  greatest  age  of  the  early  period  was 
under  foreign  kings.  Hence  there  was  little  chance  for  an  epic 
of  glorious  war.  As  for  the  abstract  deities,  the  gods  of  early 
peoples  are  not  abstract;  we  are  beginning  now  to  understand 
better  the  cults  and  faith  of  early  Rome.  There  were  no  great 
divine  happenings,  simply  because  the  worshippers  had  done 
nothing  heroic ;  for  the  myth  of  the  gods  is  a  reflection  of  the 
human  story.  The  deities  of  Rome  were  obscure,  not  abstract. 
Later,  there  was  no  need  to  invent  new  epic  poetry  when  that  of 
Greece  had  been  captured,  and  brought  home  along  with  the  rest 
of  the  booty." 

The  first  of  the  predecessors  of  Vergil  was  Andronicus  (c.  284- 
204  B.C.),  who  translated  the  Odyssey  into  Latin.  The  wander- 
ings of  Ulysses  into  those  western  seas  which  wash  the  shores  of 
Italy,  rather  than  the  siege  of  Troy  itself,  was  the  suggestive  theme 

of  Rome  might  be  traced  fairly  well  through  an  analysis  of  its  institutions.  T. 
Mommsen's  Romische  Geschichte  (ist  ed.,  1854-1856)  deliberately  ignored  the  early 
period  as  unhistorical,  but  even  the  credit  which  he  was  willing  to  allow  the  later 
sources  on  the  regal  era  (in  his  various  studies),  has  been  denied  bj"^  the  vigorous 
skepticism  of  E.  Pais,  Ancient  Legends  of  Roman  History,  Chap.  I  {The  Critical 
Method).  See  recent  manuals  of  Roman  History,  especially  W.  Ihne's  History  of  Rome 
(1871-1882),  and  the  article  in  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  Roman  History,  where  there 
is  a  short  but  excellent  history  of  Roman  historiography. 

^  Cf.  Teuflel-Schwabe,  History  of  Roman  Literature,  Vol.  I,  Sect.  20. 

2  There  is  no  argument  for  any  native  lack  of  inventive  capacity  in  the  Romans 
because  they  appropriated  Greek  culture.  Compare  America  today,  which  copies 
everything  European,  down  to  millinery.  Yet  we  like  to  think  that  our  inventive 
faculties  are  still  available  and  could  be  shifted  to  other  uses  than  those  of  business,  in 
case  of  need.  The  point  is  that  circumstances  rather  than  natural  capacity  dictate 
our  activities. 


HISTORY  AT  ROME;  ORATORY  AND   POETRY      219 

for  Italians.  Then  came  Naevius  (d.  199  B.C.),  who  wrote  the 
story  of  the  first  Punic  war,  which  he  had  himself  seen,  in  "the 
style  of  a  mediaeval  chronicle,  but  with  a  rhyming,  mythological 
framework,  after  the  Homeric  manner  (Juno  as  the  enemy,  Venus 
as  the  friend  of  the  Trojans,  Jupiter  and  Apollo  taking  personal 
part  in  the  action)."  ^  But  the  one  who  more  than  any  other, 
except  Vergil  himself,  fastened  the  poetic  legend  of  Trojan  origins 
upon  Roman  history  was  Ennius  (d.  169  B.C.),  whose  Annales  were 
placed  by  Cicero  on  the  plane  of  the  history  of  Herodotus  for 
reliability,^  whom  Livy  used  as  a  source,  and  upon  whom  Vergil 
built.  He  traced  the  history  of  Rome  from  the  landing  of  ^Eneas 
in  Italy  down  to  his  own  time,  at  the  end  of  the  second  century  B.C. 
Ennius  was  considerably  more  of  a  historian  than  one  would  at 
first  suspect  from  the  medium  he  used,  for  he  availed  himself  of  the 
Homeric  device  of  accumulating  Hsts  and  exact  data  in  order  to 
record  not  imaginary  but  historical  or  at  least  legendary  material.^ 
His  narrative  was  influenced  by  his  intimate  relations  with  the 
older  Scipio  Africanus,  and  tends  to  take  the  side  of  the  Scipios 
in  the  politics  of  the  great  Roman  houses,  as  against  the  Fabians, 
who  had  as  their  exponent  the  first  Roman  historian  —  to  be  con- 
sidered in  the  following  chapter  —  Q.  Fabius  Pictor.  Ennius 
was  successful  in  outbidding  Pictor  in  popularity,  and  the  story 
of  the  old  famihes  as  preserved  in  later  days  obscured  the 
exploits  of  the  Fabians.  But  the  creator  of  the  Latin  hexameter, 
for  Ennius  has  that  distinction,  did  not  allow  these  clannish  interests 
to  obscure  the  main  one,  which  was  the  history  of  Rome  itself. 
We  come  at  the  outset,  therefore,  upon  the  striking  fact  that  in 
poetry  as  in  prose,  from  first  to  last,  the  chief  aim  of  Latin  literature, 
responsive  to  the  demands  of  national  outlook,  is  the  exaltation  of 
the  state. 

The  culmination  of  the  poetic  legend  in  Latin  was,  of  course, 
Vergil's  jEneid.  Merely  to  recall  it  here  shows  how  far  from  the 
narrow  paths  of  history  those  delusive,  quasi-historical  interests 
take  us,  which  linked  the  Rome  of  Augustus  with  the  story  of  its 
origins.     It  was  a  work  of  genius  to  carry  into  the  sophisticated 

1  Teuffel-Schwabe,  History  of  Rotnan  Literature,  Vol.  I,  Sect.  95,  n.  8. 

2  Cicero,  De  Dinnationc,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  LVI. 

*  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Wahrhcit  und  Kunsl,  pp.  278-279. 


220    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

age  of  the  Principate  the  simphcity  and  charm  of  a  tale  of  the 
olden  time ;  to  recreate  Homer,  as  it  were,  consciously,  and  to 
impress  both  for  his  own  time  and  succeeding  ages  a  sense  of  reality 
upon  mere  poetic  imaginings  by  the  sheer,  inevitable  quality  of  art. 
Yet  this  assent  which  he  won  for  a  fabricated  myth  was  secured 
less  by  the  Homeric  power  of  narrative  than  by  stirring  the  emotions 
of  readers  over  the  fate  of  his  characters.  St.  Augustine  tells  us 
how  deeply  he  was  affected,  as  a  youth,  by  the  story  of  Dido,  dying 
for  the  love  of  iEneas,  a  tale  with  a  charm  to  rival  the  Christian 
epos.^  Vergil  shows  how  human  sympathy  may  translate  even  the 
grotesque  into  the  field  of  experience.  Next  to  this  emotional  sugges- 
tiveness  must  be  mentioned  the  religious  quality  of  Vergil's  mind, 
that  pietas  or  reverence,  which  calls  forth  a  responsive  note  wher- 
ever the  universal  ''will  to  beheve"  is  supported  by  emotion.  It 
was  reverence  for  the  greatness  in  Rome's  destiny  which  tinged 
even  the  remote  distances  with  dignity,  while  the  spell  of  the 
past  lent,  in  turn,  to  the  present  a  gleam  of  poetry  and  romance. 
Moreover,  the  narrative,  varied  as  it  was  from  simple,  natural  scenes, 
in  keeping  with  the  quiet  of  the  poet's  own  temper,  to  the  splendor 
of  imperial  visions,  offered  a  pageant  of  life  and  color  which,  until 
then,  was  unknown  in  Latin  literature.  It  is  small  wonder,  there- 
fore, that  the  myth  content  of  the  Mneid  became  fixed  upon  Rome 
as  a  substitute  for  history. 

If  consideration  of  the  myths  of  Rome  has  carried  us  over  into 
the  field  of  Latin  poetry,  before  we  have  so  much  as  secured  a  foot- 
hold in  that  of  history  proper,  we  may  as  well  profit  by  the  occasion, 
before  turning  to  the  sober  beginnings  of  prose  annals,  to  consider 
here  a  poem  which  stands  apart  from  all  others,  not  only  in 
Latin,  but  in  the  world's  literature,  and  which  is  of  deep  and  last- 
ing interest  to  thoughtful  students  of  history  —  the  poem  of  Lu- 
cretius, On  the  Nature  of  Things  {De  Rerum  Natura).  If  Vergil 
stands  with  Homer,  in  epic  power  and  universality  of  appeal, 
Lucretius  suggests  comparison  rather  with  Dante  or  Milton,  both 
in  the  sombre  ''fanatical  faith"  in  his  scheme  of  the  universe,  and 
in  his  sense  of  a  rehgious  mission,  to  rid  the  world  of  superstition.^ 

1  Augustine,  Confessiones,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XIII. 

^  Cf.  A.  W.  Verrall.  in  A  Companion  to  Latin  Studies,  edited  by  J.  E.  Sandys 
<2d  ed.,  1913),  pp.  612-613. 


HISTORY  AT   ROME;   ORATORY  AND   POETRY     221 

But  the  vision  of  the  world  which  he  proposed  to  substitute  for 
that  of  popular  imagination  was  not,  as  in  the  case  of  Dante  or 
Milton,  merely  a  reinterpretation  of  accepted  beliefs,  refined 
through  Aristotelian  or  biblical  media.  Lucretius  proposed  to 
dispense  with  myth  entirely;  and,  many  centuries  before  its  day, 
wrote  in  terms  of  science.  It  is  a  poem  for  the  twentieth  century, 
in  this  sense  perhaps  the  most  marvellous  performance  in  all  antique 
literature.  Any  survey  of  antique  processes  of  mind  as  they  bear 
upon  the  development  of  historical  outlook  would  be  sadly  in- 
complete without  an  examination  of  De  Rerum  Natura. 

Of  the  life  of  Lucretius  Carus  (c.  95-55  B.C.)  little  is  known.^ 
The  one  poem  which  has  been  left  us  appeared  just  before  Vergil's 
day,  and, "  though  it  not  only  revealed  a  profound  and  extraordinary 
genius,  but  marked  a  new  technical  level  in  Latin  poetry,  stole 
into  the  world  all  but  unnoticed,"  ^  whereas  the  Mneid  was  pro- 
duced (and  even  preserved)  ^  under  the  direct  patronage  of  Augustus. 
In  neither  style  nor  message  was  there  any  of  the  appeahng  charm 
of  Vergil ;  but  a  scheme  of  the  world  based  upon  Epicurean  philos- 
ophy, cast  into  a  ringing,  if  metallic,  verse.  Much  of  this  lies  outside 
our  field ;  we  are  not  concerned  here  with  atomistic  theories  nor 
with  the  fate  of  the  dead,  nor  even  with  the  effort  to  justify  man's 
place  in  the  universe  by  displacing  superstition  and  the  fear  of  the 
gods.  But  there  is  more  than  a  philosophy  of  history  in  the  mar- 
vellous fifth  book,  which  traces  the  birth  of  the  world  and  then,  after 
the  scientific  postulates  of  creation,  attempts  a  survey  of  the 
beginnings  of  hfe,  of  men,  and  of  civihzation.  Strongly  countering 
that  natural  tendency  to  look  backward  to  a  golden  age,  a  dawn 
of  innocence  in  an  Eden  of  the  gods,  such  as  the  Jews  or  Greeks 
had  accepted,  Lucretius  begins  with  the  slow  evolution  of  life  from 
lower  forms  to  higher ;  first  vegetable,  then  animal ;  then  primitive 

1  The  brief  notice  in  St.  Jerome's  Chronicle,  stating  that  he  lost  his  reason  through 
a  drug  and  wrote  in  the  intervals  of  sanity,  and  that  Cicero  with  his  own  hand  edited 
the  poem,  while  practically  the  only  account  we  have,  is  open  to  suspicion  on  each  of 
the  three  supposed  facts  which  it  supplies.  The  account  in  J.  W.  Mackail's  Latin 
Literature,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  IV,  while  short,  is  satisfactory.  For  detailed  bibliography 
see  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cil. 

^  J.  W.  Mackail,  op.  cit.,  p.  40. 

'Vergil,  dying  before  he  had  the  chance  to  work  it  over  as  he  wished,  had  left 
instructions  that  it  should  be  destroyed.     Augustus  countermanded  these  orders. 


222     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY   OF   HISTORY 

man,  suffering  much  but  living  a  wild  and  hardy  life.  The  begin- 
ning of  civilization  and  the  central  fact  of  social  origins  accord- 
ing to  Lucretius,  as  also  according  to  the  sociologists  today,  was  the 
discovery  and  use  of  fire ;  it  came,  not  as  a  gift  of  a  god,  but  either 
from  lightning  setting  trees  aflame,  or  from  the  friction  of  dry 
boughs  in  the  wind.  No  Vulcan  brought  fire  and  its  blessings  to 
men ;  natural  causes  led  to  its  discovery.  Then  control  of  metals 
brought  an  ever-enlarging  control  over  nature ;  and  with  settled 
life  came  poHtics  and  the  state,  the  arts  and  sciences.  Even 
reHgion  had  a  natural  origin,  although,  through  dreams  by  night 
and  the  awe  engendered  by  mystery,  mankind  created  its  gods  by 
its  own  imaginings  and  so  obscured  the  patent  but  elusive  truth. 
This  generahzed  plan  of  human  advance  is  not  history  in  the 
narrower  sense ;  but  where  such  a  genius  as  that  of  Lucretius 
illustrates  the  process,  it  offers  the  historian  more  suggestion  than 
he  sometimes  proves  worthy  of  receiving.  We  may,  therefore, 
close  this  chapter  by  quoting  a  section  or  two  from  the  one  poet- 
critic  and  philosophic  thinker  of  antiquity  who  eliminated  from  his 
mind  that  entire  myth-picture  of  social  origins  which,  in  one  form 
or  another,  obscured  with  its  mirage  the  vision  of  all  antiquity ;  and 
who,  by  so  doing,  anticipated  much  of  modern  discovery. 

Quotation  from  Lucretius  is  difi&cult,  both  because  the  expres- 
sion itself  is  often  involved  and  because  the  poem  so  holds  together 
that  extracts  fail  to  carry  the  argument.  But  one  may  catch  a 
glimpse  of  its  graphic  power  from  the  lines  which  describe  the 
various  possible  ways  in  which  the  smelting  of  metals  may  have 
been  learned : 

"...  copper  and  gold  and  iron  were  discovered,  and  with  them  the  weight 
of  silver  and  the  usefulness  of  lead,  when  a  fire  had  burnt  down  vast  forests  with 
its  heat  on  mighty  mountains,  either  when  heaven's  lightning  was  hurled 
upon  it,  or  because  waging  a  forest-war  with  one  another  men  had  carried 
fire  among  the  foe  to  rouse  panic,  or  else  because  allured  by  the  richness  of 
the  land  they  desired  to  clear  the  fat  fields,  and  make  the  countryside  into 
pastures,  or  else  to  put  the  wild  beasts  to  death,  and  enrich  themselves  with 
prey.  For  hunting  with  pit  and  fire  arose  first  before  fencing  the  grove  with 
nets  and  scaring  the  beasts  with  dogs.  However  that  may  be,  for  whatever 
cause  the  flaming  heat  had  eaten  up  the  forests  from  their  deep  roots  with 
terrible  crackling,  and  had  baked  the  earth  with  fire,  the  streams  of  silver  and 
gold,  and  hkewise  of  copper  and  lead,  gathered  together  and  trickled  from  the 


HISTORY  AT  ROME;    ORATORY  AND   POETRY     223 

boiling  veins  into  hollow  places  in  the  ground.  And  when  they  saw  them  after- 
wards hardened  and  shining  on  the  ground  with  brilliant  hue,  they  picked 
them  up,  charmed  by  their  smooth  bright  beauty,  and  saw  that  they  were 
shaped  with  outline  like  that  of  the  several  prints  of  the  hollows.  Then  it 
came  home  to  them  that  these  metals  might  be  melted  by  heat,  and  would 
run  into  the  form  and  figure  of  anything,  and  indeed  might  be  hammered  out 
and  shaped  into  points  and  tips,  however  sharp  and  fine,  so  that  they  might 
fashion  weapons  for  themselves,  and  be  able  to  cut  down  forests  and  hew  timber 
and  plane  beams  smooth,  yea,  and  to  bore  and  punch  and  drill  holes.  And, 
first  of  all,  they  set  forth  to  do  this  no  less  with  silver  and  gold  than  with  the 
resistless  strength  of  stout  copper;  all  in  vain,  since  their  power  was  van- 
quished and  yielded,  nor  could  they  like  the  others  endure  the  cruel  strain. 
Then  copper  was  of  more  value,  and  gold  was  despised  for  its  uselessness,  so 
soon  blunted  with  its  dull  edge.  Now  copper  is  despised,  gold  has  risen  to  the 
height  of  honour.  So  rolling  time  changes  the  seasons  of  things.  What  was 
of  value,  becomes  in  turn  of  no  worth;  and  then  another  thing  rises  up  and 
leaves  its  place  of  scorn,  and  is  sought  more  and  more  each  day,  and  when 
found  blossoms  into  fame,  and  is  of  wondrous  honour  among  men."  ^ 

Then  follow  a  disquisition  on  the  art  of  war  and  a  rapid  series 
of  pictures  of  the  various  stages  of  social  development,  pastoral, 
agricultural  and  urban,  ending  with  the  luxuries  of  civilization. 

"  So,  Uttle  by  little,  time  brings  out  each  several  thing  into  view,  and 
reason  raises  it  up  into  the  coasts  of  hght."^ 

The  pathway  to  those  coasts  of  light,  which  Lucretius  pointed 
out,  unhappily  lay  untravelled ;  and  there  was  ample  justification 
for  the  poignant  lines  which  he  interjected  into  the  sketch  of 
history,  when  treating  of  the  origins  of  religion  —  Hnes  which 
match  the  noblest  protests  of  reason  in  the  face  of  mystery  in  all 
literature : 

"  Ah !  unhappy  race  of  men,  when  it  has  assigned  such  acts  to  the  gods  and 
joined  therewith  bitter  anger!  what  groaning  did  they  then  beget  for  them- 
selves, what  sores  for  us,  what  tears  for  our  children  to  come  !  Nor  is  it  piety 
at  all  to  be  seen  often  with  veiled  head  turning  towards  a  stone,  and  to  draw 
near  to  every  altar,  no,  nor  to  be  prostrate  on  the  ground  with  outstretched 
palms  before  the  shrines  of  the  gods,  nor  to  sprinkle  the  altars  with  the  stream- 
ing blood  of  beasts,  nor  to  link  vow  to  vow;  but  rather  to  be  able  to  contem- 
plate all  things  with  a  mind  at  rest."  ^ 

*  Lucretius,  De  Rerum  Natura,  Bk.  V,  11.  1 241-1280,  translated  bj'  C.  Bailey,  1910. 
(Reprinted  by  permission  of  the  Clarendon  Press.) 

'^Ibid.,Bk.V,\\.  1454-1455.  ^Ibii.,  Bk.  V,  II.  1191-1203. 


224    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

But  the  mind  of  Lucretius  was  not  "at  rest."  Such  gloomy 
might  is  not  serenity.  Its  very  poise  is  protest  —  protest  against 
that  "will  to  believe"  which  is  the  universal  barrier  to  science. 
No  wonder  the  world  at  large  shrank  from  such  stern  rationalism, 
and  preferred  the  genial,  mythical  stories  of  Vergil. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

ROMAN  ANNALISTS  AND   EARLY  HISTORIANS 

In  the  last  chapter  much  was  made  of  the  Greek  characteristics 
of  the  Latin  legends  of  origin.  It  is  possible,  however,  that  the 
taste  for  indigenous  historical  materials  was  stronger  in  Rome  than 
one  would  suspect  from  the  slight  remains  we  possess.  Cicero 
tells  us  how  the  Roman  nobles  loved  to  be  glorified  in  poetry.^ 
The  ancestral  cult  of  Rome,  combined  with  this  aristocratic  tendency 
of  noble  houses  to  exalt  their  deeds,  was,  naturally,  one  of  the  main- 
springs of  Roman  history.     It  was  a  tainted  spring,  but  bountiful. 

"  It  was  customary  (says  Cicero  in  another  place  ^)  in  most  families  of  note, 
to  preserve  their  images,  their  trophies  of  honor,  and  their  memoirs,  either  to 
adorn  a  funeral  when  any  of  the  family  died,  or  to  perpetuate  the  fame 
of  their  ancestors,  or  to  prove  their  own  nobility.  But  the  truth  of  history  has 
been  much  corrupted  by  these  laudatory  essays;  for  many  circumstances 
were  recorded  in  them  which  never  happened,  such  as  false  triumphs,  a  pre- 
tended succession  of  consulships,  and  false  connections  and  distinctions,  when 
men  of  inferior  rank  were  confounded  with  a  noble  family  of  the  same  name ;  as 
if  I  myself  should  pretend  that  I  am  descended  from  Manius  Tullius,  who  was 
a  Patrician,  and  shared  the  consulship  with  Servius  Sulpicius,  about  ten  years 
after  the  expulsion  of  the  kings." 

Such  records  of  noble  families,  reaching  back  to  primitive  tradi- 
tion and  written  down  later  by  slaves  or  dependents,  formed  one  of 
the  chief  sources  for  Roman  historians  when  dealing  with  the  early 
period.    They  knew,  as  Cicero  did,  that  the  material  was  not  worth 

*  Cicero,  Pro  Archia,  Chaps.  X-XI,  Sects.  26-27.  The  description  given  here  of 
the  means  taken  by  the  Roman  dignitaries  to  preserve  their  names  and  exalt  their 
glory  reminds  one  somewhat  of  the  inscriptions  of  Egypt  or  Babylon.  Cf.  H.  Peter, 
Die  geschichtliche  Lilleratiir  iiher  die  romische  Kaiserzeil  bis  Thcodosius  I  utid  Hire  Qitellen, 
Vol.  I,  Chap.  II  {Das  geschichtliche  Inkrcssc  ds  Publikums). 

^  Cicero,  Brutus,  Chap.  XVI.     (Translation  based  on  Watson's.) 

225 


226      INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

much  ;  ^  but  they  did  not  know  how  to  apply  the  canons  of  historical 
criticism  so  as  to  move  surely  and  safely  through  their  treacherous 
offerings. 

By  way  of  these  specious  antecedents  of  history  we  pass  from 
poetry  to  prose,  that  farthest  flung  line  of  the  scientific  advance. 
Prose  literature,  developing  slowly  and  late  in  Rome  as  elsewhere, 
naturally  came  more  directly  under  Greek  influence  than  poetry. 
Written  Latin  prose  did  not  rise  to  rival  the  spoken  Latin  until 
Cicero's  day,  which  partly  explains  why  there  is  so  much  about 
orators  in  Cicero's  essays  and  the  echo  of  a  similar  interest  in  the 
historians  —  even  in  Tacitus.  Moreover,  Latin  prose  literature  had 
a  short  period  of  flower,  declining  after  the  first  century  of  the 
empire,  partly  because  the  formalism  of  the  patrician  periods  was 
out  of  keeping  with  the  realism  of  business,  and  partly  because 
the  men  of  the  provinces  developed  their  varied  forms  of  speech. 
History-writing  among  the  Romans  did  not,  therefore,  develop  its 
own  natural  media  of  expression,  but  like  a  borrowed  or  captured 
piece  of  art  remained  more  or  less  out  of  place  in  its  setting.  The 
fagade  was  Attic,  or  affected  by  Attic  influences ;  yet  the  structure 
of  most  Roman  histories  was  of  the  simplest  and  homeliest  of  designs 
—  that  of  the  annal. 

The  starting  point  for  this  annalistic  treatment  was  that  register 
of  annual  events  kept  by  the  Pontifex  Maximus  in  the  Regia,  which 
has  been  described  above  in  the  passage  from  Cicero.^  It  was 
there  where  "all  the  people  had  the  liberty  to  inspect  it."  So 
important  was  it,  that  its  style  "was  adopted  by  many"  of  the 

^  In  this  connection  mention  should  be  made  of  the  use  of  the  old  inscriptions  by 
the  later  historians.  Monumental  inscriptions  were  used  by  both  Greek  and  Roman 
historians  of  early  Rome,  but  they  were  sometimes  misled  by  what  they  saw,  and  the 
monuments  became  foundations  for  new  myths,  as  is  likely  to  be  the  case  anywhere 
if  full  contemporary  records  are  missing.  Vide  supra,  the  myth  of  Osiris.  E.  Pais, 
Ancient  Legends  of  Roman  History,  Chap.  VII,  has  a  good  discussion  on  this  point. 

-  C/.  p.  213.  On  the  Annates  Maximi  there  has  been  considerable  discussion. 
The  few  fragments  concerning  them  are  given  in  H.  Peter's  Hisloricorum  Romanonim 
Reliquiae  (2  vols.,  1906-1914,  with  Bibliography  to  1914),  Vol.  I,  pp.  iii-xxix  {De 
Annalibus  Maximis);  cf.  Teuffel-Schwabe,  History  of  Roman  Literature,  Vol.  I,  Sects. 
73-77-  The  contributions  of  O.  Seeck,  Die  Kalcndertafel  der  Pontijices  (1885),  and  of 
W.  Soltau,  Rbmische  Chronologie  (pp.  442  sqq.),  may  be  cited ;  but  the  field  is  intricate 
as  can  be  seen  from  the  article  Annates  (by  Cichorius)  in  Pauly-Wissowa,  Real- 
Encyclopadie  der  classischen  AUertumswissenschaft,  Vol.  I,  pp.  2248  sqq. 


'       ROMAN  ANNALISTS  AND   EARLY  HISTORIANS     227 

earlier  Roman  historians,  a  style  *'  without  any  ornaments,"  "simple 
chronicles  of  times,  persons,  places  and  events."  In  the  eyes  of 
Cicero,  history  at  Rome  developed  mainly  along  the  lines  of  this 
annalistic  writing ;  and  so  it  had  up  to  his  time.  The  description 
he  gives  is  confirmed  by  an  examination  of  the  available  references 
to  obscure  authors  and  by  the  traces  they  have  left  upon  the  method 
of  Livy  and  Tacitus  themselves. 

The  extract  from  Cicero  on  the  Annales  Maximi,  slight  as  it  is, 
is  matched  by  only  one  other  paragraph  in  the  Latin  literature  which 
has  come  down  to  us.  In  the  closing  part  of  the  fourth  century  of 
our  era,  Servius,  a  grammarian,  who  wrote  an  exhaustive  com- 
mentary on  Vergil,  described  the  pontifical  annals  as  follows : 

"  The  annals  were  made  in  this  way.  The  pontifex  maximus  had  a  white 
tablet  (prepared)  every  year,  on  which,  on  certain  days,^  he  was  accustomed  to 
note,  under  the  names  of  the  consuls  and  other  magistrates,  those  deeds  both 
at  home  and  in  the  field,  on  land  or  at  sea,  which  were  deemed  worthy  to  be 
held  in  remembrance.  The  diligence  of  the  ancients  inscribed  80  books  with 
these  annual  commentaries,  and  these  were  called  Annales  Maximi  from  the 
Pontifices  Maximi  by  whom  they  were  made.  .  .  ."  ^ 

The  starting  point  for  our  survey  is  therefore  the  Regia,  or  house 
of  the  head  of  that  college  of  priests,  the  pontifices,  who  had  perpet- 
uated the  religious  duties  of  the  abolished  kingship,  having  charge 
of  the  calendar  and  the  archives,  that  is,  both  the  measurement  and 
the  record  of  time.  The  album  or  white  wood  tablet  which  our 
sources  describe  —  and  the  two  quoted  are  practically  all  there  are 
on  the  Annales  Maximi  —  was  therefore  but  one  of  several  records 
in  their  keeping.  In  addition  to  those  which  dealt  more  especially 
with  sacred  science,  the  Libri  pontificum  and  the  Commentarii 
pontificum,  there  were  also  Fasti  calendar es  or  Fasti  consular es, 
with  the  names  of  officials  and  items  for  the  calendar.    The  Annales 

*  Per  singulos  dies,  not  every  day,  but  when  the  event  happened.  Hence  the  acta 
diurna,  or  official  daily  bulletin  from  the  time  of  Julius  Caesar,  was  not  a  continuation 
of  this.  Vide  O.  Seeck,  Die  Kalendertafel  der  Pontifices,  p.  62 ;  H.  Peter,  Ilistoricorum 
Romanorum  Reliquiae,  Vol.  I,  p.  x. 

^  Servii  Grammatici  qui  Feruntur  in  Verf^ilii  Carmina  Commentarii,  edited  by  George 
Thilo  and  Hermann  Hagen  (3  vols.,  1878-1887),  Vol.  I,  Bk.  I,  1.  373.  This  para- 
graph occurs  only  in  the  manuscript  published  by  Daniel  in  1600.  On  whether 
it  belongs  to  Servius  or  to  a  later  commentator  see  the  edition  by  Thilo  and  the 
bibliographical  indications  in  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cit..  Vol.  II,  Sect.  431,  n.  2. 


228    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

differed  from  the  rest  in  that  they  were  prepared  for  the  public. 
How  extensive  they  were  is  a  matter  of  conjecture.  Cicero  rhetori- 
cally dates  them  from  the  very  origin  of  Rome.^  The  repeated 
destruction  of  the  Regia  by  fire  really  left  the  later  Roman  anti- 
quaries in  the  dark  as  to  their  actual  extent.  It  seems  likely,  how- 
ever, that  no  contemporary  pontifical  annal  oj  the  kind  described 
was  kept  during  the  long  period  when  Rome  grew  from  a  group  of 
farming  villages  to  be  the  chief  city  of  Latium.  The  contemporary 
history  began  rather  in  the  period  of  the  conquest  of  the  Medi- 
terranean.^ In  any  case  the  sack  of  Rome  by  the  Gauls  destroyed 
whatever  the  pontiffs  had  preserved.  Livy  tells  us  that  "what- 
ever was  contained  in  the  commentaries  of  the  pontiffs  and  other 
public  and  private  records,  was  lost,  for  the  most  part,  in  the  burning 
of  the  city."  ^  The  great  pile  of  dry  wood  in  the  Regia  was  right 
at  hand  for  the  Gauls  to  warm  themselves,  and  the  tablets  must 
have  made  good  fuel.'*  The  result  was  that,  whatever  historical 
data  the  early  pontiffs  prepared,  the  later  Romans  could  not 
profit  from  them.  Year  by  year,  however,  during  the  robust 
period  of  the  republican  expansion,  the  Pontifex  would  hang  up  the 
white  tablet  on  the  wall  of  his  house  for  the  citizens  to  see,  and  for 
such  as  could,  to  read.  The  practice  lasted  until  about  1 20  B.C.  when, 
owing  to  the  growth  of  the  histories  by  private  individuals,  it  be- 
came superfluous.  Then  P.  Mucins  Scaevola  published  the  whole 
extant  collection  in  one  volume  of  eighty  books,  as  Servius  intimates 
in  the  extract  above.^  Upon  the  whole  it  would  seem  that  this 
official  history  shared  the  defects  of  such  compositions,  as  we  have 
noted  them  elsewhere,  with  only  this  in  its  favor,  that  in  a  republic 
the  rival  claims  of  leaders  and  clans  act  in  some  degree  in  the  place 
of  criticism.     Whether  it  was  the  prominence  of  these  official  annals 

*  "Ab  initio  rerum  Romanarum." 

^  C/.  W.  Soltau,  Die  Anfangc  der  roemischen  Geschichtschreibung,  p.  228;  A. 
Enmann,  Die  aelteste  Redaction  der  Pontificalannalen  (in  Rheinisches  Museum, 
Vol.  LV  (1902),  pp.  517-533),  places  the  origin  of  the  yearly  tablet  for  public  use  at 
about  400  B.C. 

'  Livy,  Ab  Urbe  Condita,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  I. 

*  O.  Seeck,  Die  Kalendertafel  der  Pontifices,  p.  74.  In  fact  their  menace  to  the  safety 
of  the  surrounding  buildings  was  almost  as  great  as  the  pile  of  inflammable  papers  by 
the  heating  plants  of  some  of  the  buildings  in  Washington. 

*  E.  Pais  announced  in  Ancient  Legends  of  Roman  History  (1905),  Chap.  I,  that 
he  has  been  gathering  the  fragments  of  the  Annates  Maximi  for  publication. 


ROMAN  ANNALISTS   AND    EARLY  HISTORIANS     229 

or  not  which,  in  the  absence  of  genuine  historical  literature,  made 
the  annalistic,  or  at  least  chronological,  structure  the  chief  orthodox 
form  for  history-writing  in  Latin,  the  fact  remains  that  Roman 
historiography  is  strikingly  held  to  the  annahstic  mould.  Even 
Tacitus'  Annates  bear  (though  disguised)  the  common  impress.* 
Indeed  the  word  annal  was  much  more  the  synonym  for  "history" 
than  historia.  Not  only  was  it  used  in  that  general  sense  in  which  it 
is  used  in  English  in  such  phrases  as  "the  annals  of  the  poor"  or 
"the  annals  of  the  Empire," 2  but  in  the  eyes  of  the  grammarians  it 
was  the  only  correct  term  for  history  of  the  past.  Historia  was 
properly  used  only  of  contemporaneous  narrative.^  So,  indeed, 
we  find  the  works  of  Tacitus  which  deal  with  his  own  day  termed 
Historiae  and  those  dealing  with  an  earlier  period  Annates,  although 
these  titles  probably  do  not  come  from  Tacitus'  own  hand.^ 

The  official  annals,  therefore,  seem  to  have  played  a  consider- 
able role  in  early  Roman  historiography.  Of  the  remaining  books 
of  the  priesthood,  the  Fasti  are,  perhaps,  the  most  important. 
These  began  as  lists  of  days  for  the  calendar,  the  lucky  and  un- 
lucky days  —  dies  fasti  and  dies  nefasti;  and  as  such  remained, 
through  a  varied  history,  the  basis  of  calendar-making  on  down, 

'  On  the  influence  of  the  old  annalistic  forms  on  Tacitus'  works  see  E.  Courbaud, 
Les  precedes  d  'art  de  Tacite  dans  les  Histoires  (1918),  p.  34  and  references. 

2  So  Ennius  called  his  epic  Annales;  and  when  Vergil  refers  to  the  content  of  early 
history  he  uses  the  same  general  term.  Cf.  Mneid,  Bk.  I,  1.  373,  El  vacet  annales 
nostrorum  audire  laborum. 

^Thus  Servius,  commenting  on  the  line  of  Vergil  quoted  here,  says:  "There  is 
this  difference  between  history  and  annals :  history  deals  with  these  times  which  we 
witness  or  have  been  able  to  %vitness.  The  word  comes  from  laTopiiv,  that  is  'to 
see'  (dicta  6.ir6  rod  la-TopeTv,  id  est  videre) ;  but  annals  are  of  those  times  of  which 
our  age  is  ignorant.  Hence  Livy  consists  of  both  annals  and  history.  Nevertheless 
they  are  freely  used  one  for  the  other,  as  in  this  place  where  he  says  'annals'  for  'his- 
tory.'" Aulus  Gellius  had  earlier  {Nodes  Atticae,  Book  V,  Chap.  XVIII)  cited  the 
authority  of  Verrius  Flaccus  the  lexicographer  for  this  distinction  of  meaning  and  ad- 
duced practically  the  only  fragment  we  have  of  Sempronius  Asellio,  one  of  the  later 
annalists,  to  show  that  the  narrower  meaning  of  the  word,  a  3'early  list  of  happenings, 
was  their  ideal  of  history.  Asellio  is  impatient  with  the  narrowness  of  those  who  do 
not  connect  the  isolated  items  of  war  or  conquest  with  the  broader  theme  of  politics, 
and  terms  such  monastic  a.nn?i\s  fabulas  ptieris,  unworthy  the  name  of  history.  For 
discussion  of  this  point  see  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cit.,  Vol.  I,  Sect.  37,  n.  3. 

^  It  is  doubtful  if  they  bore  any  such  titles,  but  more  likely,  as  in  the  case  of  T-ivy, 
whose  work  was  termed  Ab  urbe  condita  libri,  the  annals  of  Tacitus  were  probably 
Ab  excessu  d.  Augusti. 


230    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

even  through  the  Julian  reform  and  into  the  Christian  era.  The 
name  was  therefore  naturally  transferred  as  well  to  denote  annalistic 
chronicles,  lists  of  years  giving  the  names  of  the  consuls,  etc.  {Fasti 
consulares)  and  the  lists  of  triumphs  {Fasti  triump hales) .  Two  such 
lists  were  drawn  up  in  the  reign  of  Augustus.^ 

In  addition  to  the  Annates  Maximi  and  the  Fasti  of  the  pontiffs, 
there  were  lists  of  secular  magistrates,  such  as  the  Libri  magistra- 
tuum  or  Books  of  the  Magistrates,  reminding  one  of  the  Eponym  lists 
of  the  Assyrians.  Some  of  them  were  written  on  linen  {libri 
lintei)  and  kept  in  the  temple  of  Juno  Moneta,  the  Goddess  of 
Memory,  on  the  Capitol.  Livy  may  have  these  in  mind  when  he 
refers  repeatedly  to  the  libri  magistratuum,^  or  he  may  use  the  term 
to  cover  all  similar  sources  and  even  the  Annates  Maximi.  For,  by 
the  end  of  the  republican  era  there  were  a  number  of  such  collec- 
tions, and  antiquarians  were  already  working  on  them. 

When  we  turn  from  these  materials  for  history  to  history  itself, 
we  find,  significantly  enough,  that  the  line  of  Roman  historians  is 
headed  by  one  who  wrote  in  Greek.  Q.  Fabius  Pictor  is  commonly 
recognized  as  the  first  Roman  historian.^  Born  about  254  B.C.  of 
distinguished  family,  he  played  a  leading  part  in  the  wars  with 
Ligurians  and  Gauls,  before  the  war  with  Hannibal,  in  which  he 
also  took  part.  His  History  {la-ropta)^  which  carried  the  story 
of  Rome  from  the  days  of  yEneas  to  his  own  time,  was  en- 
riched by  access  to  the  archives  of  his  family,  in  which  —  as  has 
been  the  case  so  often  in  our  day  —  the  official  documents  of  official 
members  of  the  family  had  found  a  resting  place.  He  wrote  for 
the  nobles,  not  for  the  commonalty  (as  did  his  contemporary  Plautus, 
the  author  of  comedy),  and  memoirs  of  nobles  are  also  traceable  in 
his  work.     In  fact,  history-writing  in  Rome  remained  down  to  the 

^  See  the  articles  Fasli  in  Daremberg  and  Saglio's  Didionnaire  des  ant'iqiiites, 
and  (by  Schon)  in  Pauly-Wissowa's  Real-Encyclopadie.  The  Fasti  Triumphales  have 
just  been  published  in  an  exhaustively  critical  edition  by  E.  Pais  (2  vols.,  1920)  in  the 
CoUezione  dl  fesli  e  monumenti  romani  of  E.  Pais  and  F.  Stella  Maranca. 

2  Livy,  Ab  Urbe  Condita,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  IV;  Bk.  IV,  Chaps.  VII,  XX. 

3  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit  und  Kunsi,  pp.  273  sqq.,  whose  account  has  been 
mainly  used  for  what  follows.  For  the  fragments  of  Fabius  Pictor  see  H.  Peter, 
Historicorum  Romanorum  Reliquiae,  Vol.  I,  pp.  LXIX-C,  pp.  5-39-  There  was  appar- 
ently a  Latin  translation  or  version. 


ROMAN  ANNALISTS  AND   EARLY  HISTORIANS     231 

days  of  Sulla,  a  privilege  of  the  upper  class,  from  which  it  drew  its 
readers  and  to  which  it  appealed,  leaving  a  perspective  for  Roman 
social  history  which  only  modern  scholarship  has  been  able  in  part 
to  correct.  As  for  Fabius  Pictor,  he  furnished  Polybius  with  his  main 
guide  for  the  second  Punic  war,  in  spite  of  Polybius'  uncompHmen- 
tary  remarks  about  him,  due,  perhaps,  as  has  been  suggested,  to 
the  rivalry  of  the  Scipios  (Polybius'  patrons)  with  the  Fabii.^  While 
Livy  apparently  included  him  in  the  indefinite  references  to  the 
"most  ancient  writers,"  he  also  twice  refers  to  him  specifically  as 
"  the  oldest  historian  "  and  once  as  the  trustworthy  contemporary 
of  the  events  described,  whose  name  cited  in  the  texts  would  substan- 
tiate the  narrative.^  After  Livy's  day  he  ceased  to  be  known  to 
Roman  authors,  although  he  was  still  used  by  Greek  historians. 

The  real  father  of  Roman  history,  however,  was  M.  Porcius 
Cato,  that  most  Roman  of  Romans,  who  fought  the  influence  of 
Greece,  yet  revealed  a  mind  saturated  in  Greek  thought,  and  who, 
according  to  Cicero  and  Nepos,  learned  Greek  itself  late  in  hfe.^ 
Born  about  234  B.C.  he  Hved  a  busy  public  life,  holding  the  highest 
offices,  and  meanwhile  writing  earnestly  and  much  at  those  earhest 
books  of  Latin  prose,  his  treatises  on  agriculture,  war,  oratory,  as 
well  as  history.  His  history,  the  seven  books  of  Origines,  was  a 
national  work,  but  it  repeated  the  Greek  myths  of  origin.  The 
prefaces  to  his  books  recall  the  school  of  Isocrates  which  he 
ridiculed ;  ^  and  his  pragmatic  outlook  recommending  history  for 
practical  uses,^  while  natural  enough  in  a  Roman,  was  also  to  be 
found  in  the  Greeks  from  whom  he  professedly  turned  away. 
Again,  although  he  kept  to  the  annalistic  form,  he  found  it  admirably 
suited  for  the  insertion  of  orations  in  the  formal  style,  and  inserted 
them  to  such  an  extent  that  the  speeches  were  even  brought  to- 
gether as  a  special  collection  by  themselves. 

Cato  was  a  thorough  and  careful  worker ;  all  Latin  writers  bear 
witness  to  that.     Cicero  refers  to  his  study  of  the  inscriptions  on 

1  The  Histories  of  Polybius,  Bk.  Ill,  Chaps.  VIII-IX;  c/.  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cil., 
Vol.  I,  Sect.  n6,  n.  2,  with  references. 

2  Cf.  Livy,  Ah  Urbe  Condita,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XLIV;  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XL;  Bk.  XXII, 
Chap.  VII. 

'  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit  und  Kunst,  pp.  282  sq. 

«  Cf.  Plutarch,  Viiac  Parallclae,  Chap.  XXIII  {Cato). 

^  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Historicorum  Romanorum  Reliquiae,  Fragment  3. 


232    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

tombstones  ^  —  which  may  also  reflect  a  lesson  from  the  Greeks. 
But  his  interest  did  not  extend  to  the  varied  data  of  the  social  life, 
it  was  strictly  limited  to  politics.  A  citation  preserved  by  Aulus 
Gellius,  a  chatty  antiquary  of  the  second  century  a.d.,  is  worth 
quoting : 

"  They  [the  Romans]  were  not  very  strenuous  in  their  endeavours  to  explore 
the  causes  of  the  eclipses  of  the  sun  and  moon.  For  M.  Cato,  who  was  in- 
defatigable in  his  researches  after  learning,  has  spoken  upon  this  subject  in- 
decisively and  without  curiosity.  His  words  in  the  fourth  book  of  Origins  are 
these :  '  I  have  no  inclination  to  transcribe  what  appears  on  the  tablet  of  the 
Pontifex  Maximus,  how  often  corn  is  dear,  how  often  the  Hght  of  the  sun  or 
moon  is,  from  some  cause  or  other,  obscured.'  "^ 

From  the  valuable  treatise  on  agriculture  which  he  left  us,  we 
can  imagine  that  Cato  followed  the  grain  quotations  of  the  Regia 
very  closely,  and  as  he  brought  to  the  task  of  history-writing  the 
training  of  a  practical  man,  we  have  every  reason  to  regret  that 
he  did  not  do  exactly  the  thing  he  here  refuses  to  do.  The  one 
thing,  however,  which  the  whole  of  this  survey  teaches,  is  that  his- 
tory reflects  the  major  interests  of  the  society  which  produces  it,  and 
that  the  insight  of  historians  into  the  importance  of  events  is 
relatively  slight,  except  as  they  are  interpreters  of  their  own  time. 
The  dominant  interest  of  the  men  around  Cato  was  no  longer 
agriculture,  as  in  the  early  days  of  the  farmer-state,  but  war  and 
pohtics  and  the  struggle  with  Carthage.  Hence  the  trivial  inci- 
dents of  the  priestly  annals  were  to  be  ignored. 

Subsequent  historians  at  Rome  agreed  with  Cato  in  this,  but 
they  ceased  to  struggle  as  he  did  against  the  Greek  invasion,  and 
as  rhetoric  gained  the  day  more  and  more,  Cato  was  less  and  less 
read  until,  in  Cicero's  day,  he  was  almost  entirely  left  aside.  It  is 
interesting,  therefore,  to  find  Cicero  himself  turning  to  Cato's 
defence,  for  it  shows  what  solid  worth  there  must  have  been  in 
the  first  of  the  Roman  historians : 

"Not  to  omit  his  [Cato's]  Antiquities,  who  will  deny  that  these  also  are 
adorned  with  every  flower,  and  with  all  the  lustre  of  eloquence  ?  And  yet  he  has 
scarcely  any  admirers ;  which  some  ages  ago  was  the  case  of  Philistiis  the  Syra- 

»  Cicero,  Cato  Maior,  Chap.  XI,  Sect.  38 ;  Chap.  VII,  Sect.  21. 
2  The  Attic  Nights  of  Aulus  Gellius,  Bk.  II,   Chap.   XXVIII.     (Translated  by 
W.  Beloe.) 


ROMAN  ANNALISTS  AND   EARLY  HISTORIANS     233 

cusan,  and  even  of  Thucydides'  himself.  For  as  the  lofty  and  elevated  style 
of  Theopompus  soon  diminished  the  reputation  of  their  pithy  and  laconic 
harangues,!  which  were  sometimes  scarcely  intelligible  from  excessive  brevity 
and  quaintness;  and  as  Demosthenes  eclipsed  the  glory  of  Lysias;  so  the 
pompous  and  stately  elocution  of  the  moderns  has  obscured  the  lustre  of 
Cato.  But  many  of  us  are  deficient  in  taste  and  discernment,  for  we  admire  the 
Greeks  for  their  antiquity,  and  what  is  called  their  Attic  neatness,  and  yet 
have  never  noticed  the  same  quality  in  Cato.  This  was  the  distinguishing 
character,  say  they,  of  Lysias  and  Hyperides.  I  own  it,  and  I  admire  them  for 
it ;  but  why  not  allow  a  share  of  it  to  Cato  ?  They  are  fond,  they  tell  us,  of 
the  Attic  style  of  eloquence ;  and  their  choice  is  certainly  judicious,  provided 
they  do  not  only  copy  the  dry  bones,  but  imbibe  the  animal  spirits  of  these 
models.  What  they  recommend,  however,  is,  to  do  it  justice,  an  agreeable 
quality.  But  why  must  Lysias  and  Hyperides  be  so  fondly  admired,  while 
Cato  is  entirely  overlooked?  His  language  indeed  has  an  antiquated  air,  and 
some  of  his  expressions  are  rather  too  harsh  and  inelegant.  But  let  us  remember 
that  this  was  the  language  of  the  time ;  only  change  and  modernise  it,  which 
it  was  not  in  his  power  to  do ;  add  the  improvements  of  number  and  cadence, 
give  an  easier  turn.  .  .  .^  I  know,  indeed,  that  he  is  not  sufficiently  pol- 
ished, and  that  recourse  must  be  had  to  a  more  perfect  model  for  imitation; 
for  he  is  an  author  of  such  antiquity,  that  he  is  the  oldest  now  extant  whose 
writings  can  be  read  with  patience ;  and  the  ancients,  in  general,  acquired  a 
much  greater  reputation  in  every  other  art  than  in  that  of  speaking."  ^ 

There  was  another  reason,  however,  besides  the  severity  of  his 
style,  for  the  neglect  of  Cato's  history  by  the  contemporaries  of 
Cicero.  If  history  was  prized  at  Rome  by  the  aristocracy  for  the 
glory  it  reflected  on  their  noble  houses,  there  was  little  use  preserv- 
ing Cato's  Origins.  For  this  confirmed  enemy  of  the  upper  class 
made  it  a  point  to  omit  the  names  of  leaders  in  describing  the 
achievements  of  Roman  arms;  and  carried  his  grim  humor  so  far, 
on  the  other  hand,  as  to  preserve  for  future  generations  the  name 
of  an  especially  fierce  elephant  which  fought  bravely  in  the  line  of 
battle.^ 

We  must  leave  it  to  more  detailed  surveys  to  describe  the 
writers  who  carried  the  story  of  Rome  down  to  the  last  years  of 

'Thucydides  eclipsed  by  Theopompus!  Cf.  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cit.,  Vol.  I, 
Sect.  185,  with  references. 

2  Cicero,  Brutus,  Chap.  XVII. 

3 /^/J.,  Chap.  XVIII. 

^  Cf.  Pliny,  Naturalis  Historiae  Lihri  XXXVII,  Bk.  VIII,  Chap.  XI;  Plutarch, 
Vitae  Parallelae,  Chap.  XXV  (Cato). 


234    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

the  republic,  writers  such  as  P.  Mucius  Scaevola,  who  in  123  B.C.  as 
Pontifex  Maximus  ended  the  old  Annates  Maximi,  and  published 
them ;  L.  Ccelius  Antipater  the  jurist,  who  broke  with  the  old  anna- 
listic  style ;  thoughtful  scholars  like  Sempronius  Asellio,  who  sought 
in  the  manner  of  Polybius  to  establish  the  causes  of  events ;  ^  Q. 
Claudius  Quadrigarius  and  the  more  popular  but  less  critical  Valerius 
Antias ;  L.  Cornelius  Sisenna,  the  historian  of  the  period  of  Sulla;  or 
C.  Licinius  Macer,  whose  Annales  seem  to  have  been  more  contro- 
versial than  accurate.  Although  these  writers  were  gratefully  used 
by  later  Latin  historians,  and  above  all  by  Livy,^  so  little  has  been 
left  of  their  works  or  about  them  as  to  render  comment  a  matter 
of  minute  erudition,  out  of  place  in  a  study  like  this.  Cicero,  how- 
ever, viewing  history  from  the  standpoint  of  literature,  offers  an 
illuminating  comment  on  Antipater,  who  wrote  at  the  close  of  the 
second  century.  Historians  up  to  that  time,  says  Cicero,  were 
simply  makers  of  annals  {annalium  confectiores)  and  for  him  history 
in  the  proper  sense  began  with  Antipater,  the  first  to  adorn  his  tale 
with  art  or  artifice  (exornator  rerum)  instead  of  being,  as  his  prede- 
cessors were,  mere  narrators.^ 

L.  CceUus  Antipater  was  a  distinguished  jurist  and  teacher  of 
oratory,  who  lived  a  scholarly  and  retired  Hfe.  Perhaps  owing  to 
this  retirement  he  gave  up  the  pragmatic  principle  and  substituted 
for  his  aim  rather  that  ''pleasure  to  the  ear"  (delectare)  which 
Thucydides  had  once  denounced  but  which  the  followers  of  Isocrates 
had  made  the  vogue.^  He  lacked  the  restraint  and  good  taste  of 
the  Greek,  however,  carrying  rhythm  to  extreme,  and  introducing 
not  only  speeches,  but  also  anecdotes  and  breaking  the  narrative 
with  all  kinds  of  diversions  so  that  the  reader  should  not  suffer 
ennui.  For  instance,  instead  of  giving  the  figures  of  Scipio's 
expedition  to  Africa,  he  tells  us  that  birds  fell  from  heaven  at  the 
noise  of  the  shouting  soldiers.    As  Thucydides  had  done,  he  chose 

^  Vide  supra,  p.  229,  n.  3. 

2  Livy  cites  Antias  thirty-five  times,  Quadrigarius  ten  times.  On  the  remains  of 
these  writers  see  the  works  of  H.  Peter  quoted  above,  and  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cit., 
Vol.  I,  Sects.  155  sqq. 

^  "Ceteri  non  exornatores  rerum,  sed  tantummodo  narratores  fuerunt."  Cicero, 
De  Oratore,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  XII. 

^  H.  Peter's  admirable  account  of  Antipater  in  Wahrheit  iind  Kunst  has  been 
summarized  in  this  paragraph. 


ROMAN  ANNALISTS  AND  EARLY  HISTORIANS    235 

a  single  war,  the  second  Punic/  as  his  theme,  rather  than  the  whole 
story  of  Rome.  In  his  preface  he  tells  frankly  that  he  takes  it 
from  those  authors  who  are  deemed  reliable,^  meaning  Fabius 
Pictor  and  Cato ;  there  is  naturally  no  trace  of  Polybius.  The 
seven  books  of  this  history  were  used  as  texts  for  criticism  in  the 
days  of  Cicero's  youth,  and  where  rhetoric  flourished  more  than 
history,  Antipater  flourished  with  it.  Hadrian  is  said  to  have  pre- 
ferred him  to  Sallust  —  the  student  of  Thucydides,  the  first  real 
Roman  historian  in  the  eyes  of  the  modern. 

*  Belli  Punlci  AUerius  Hisloriae. 

*  Ex  scriptis  eorum  qui  veri  arbitrantur. 


CHAPTER  XX 

VARRO,  C.^SAR  AND  SALLUST 

If  the  achievement  of  Roman  historians  was  disappointing,  the 
fault  did  not  He  altogether  in  a  lack  of  interest  about  the  past,  as  is 
witnessed  by  the  list  of  historians  of  the  closing  era  of  the  Republic 
which  has  been  given  in  the  last  chapter ;  and  historians  were  not 
the  only  ones  to  contribute  antiquarian  lore.  There  were,  in 
addition  to  poets  and  historians,  other  scholars  as  well,  at  work  on 
all  kinds  of  curious  investigation,  interpreting  auguries  or  the 
archaic  hymns  of  the  Salii,  studying  the  history  of  law  or  philosophy 
or  the  etymology  of  words,  or  simply  writing  encyclopaedic  surveys 
of  things  in  general.  This  movement  of  scholarship  forms  a  notable 
supplement  to  Roman  historiography,  reaching  as  it  does  all  the 
way  from  Cato,  through  Varro,  to  the  elder  Pliny.  Partly  in  the 
form  of  practical  manuals,  partly  in  erudite  volumes,  it  preserved  a 
mass  of  data  for  the  learned  society  of  Cicero's  day  and  later ;  and 
it  helped  to  satisfy  curiosity  as  to  striking  events  or  unusual  customs. 
But  the  essentials  of  criticism  were  lacking, —  that  is,  adequate 
tools ;  and  it  need  not  surprise  the  reader  of  this  study  to  find  that 
the  work  of  these  scholars  was,  upon  the  whole,  on  a  lower  plane 
than  that  of  the  historians.  The  test  of  success  for  the  antiquarian 
at  Rome  seems  to  have  been  what  it  was  for  the  American  capitalist 
in  the  nineteenth  century,  mere  amount  of  output.  Varro,  for 
instance,  wrote  between  six  and  seven  hundred  volumes.  The 
author  of  so  many  works  could  not  examine  with  discerning  care 
the  sources  from  which  such  a  vast  store  of  learning  was  drawn. 
The  credulous,  uncritical  character  of  Pliny's  great  Natural  History, 
the  final  summing  up  of  this  encyclopaedic  historical  Hterature, 
is  a  fair  indication  of  its  inability  to  sort  out  fact  from  fiction; 
due  to  the  absence  not  only  of  historical  discipHnes,  but  also  of 
those  of  the  other  sciences  which  deal  with  human  evolution :  the 
sciences   of   language,   philology;    of   society,   anthropology;    of 

236 


VARRO,    C^SAR   AND   SALLUST  237 

comparative  religion.  Yet,  inaccurate  or  not,  these  collections  of 
the  data  of  history  were  at  hand  for  the  Romans  to  read ;  and  as 
the  reader  is  generally  still  less  critical  than  the  writer,  there 
were  probably  few  who  had  any  idea  of  how  thin  the  line  of  estab- 
lished fact  really  was.  On  the  contrary,  at  least  from  the  day  of 
Varro,  it  must  have  seemed  to  them  more  like  an  enveloping  —  if 
hazy  —  sea,  in  which  only  the  most  expert  could  find  his  bearings. 

We  should  have  a  better  idea  of  the  situation  if  the  works  of 
Varro  had  come  down  to  us  in  anything  like  the  way  in  which  those 
of  Cicero  were  preserved.  But  whether  it  be,  as  Augustine  suggests, 
that  the  appeal  to  the  lover  of  words  is  stronger  than  that  to  the 
lover  of  facts, ^  or  that  the  facts  ceased  to  have  any  meaning  by 
themselves,  there  remain  but  slight  fragments  of  the  many  writings 
of  Varro.  Born  in  116  B.C.,  and  therefore  Cicero's  senior  by  ten 
years,  Varro  lived  a  long  and  busy  life,  not  as  a  hermit-scholar, 
but  as  a  man  of  affairs,  taking  an  active  part  in  politics ;  a  some- 
what whimsical  man,  as  his  satirical  miscellany  shows.  The  only 
work  which  concerns  us,  however,  is  his  treatise  on  Roman  Antiq- 
uities, published  in  47  B.C.  There  were  twenty-five  books  deahng 
with  human  and  sixteen  with  "divine"  antiquities.  The  data 
were  grouped  into  large  sections  under  Persons,  Places,  Times  and 
Things.  There  was  no  attempt  to  establish  their  interconnection 
historically,  but  simply  an  amassing  of  curious  facts.  Strangely 
enough,  while  the  part  dealing  with  human  affairs  was  lost,  portions 
of  the  reHgious  section,  the  Antiquitates  Rerum  Divinarmn, 
were  destined  to  be  passed  down  to  us  because  of  the  interest  of 
Christian  theology  in  combating  the  pagan  deities.  Augustine's 
City  of  God  quoted,  in  order  to  ridicule  them,  Varro's  accounts  of 
the  early  cults  of  Rome.  Modern  scholarship,  correcting  Varro  in 
places,  is  upon  the  whole  able  to  profit  better  from  the  data  he  offers 
than  were  the  Fathers  of  the  Church;  and  perhaps,  also,  better 
than  the  believing  pagans.  To  these  Varro  supplied  something 
like  a  "counterblast"  to  the  negative  criticism  of  Lucretius,^  and 
helped  to  restore  that  emphasis  upon  the  good  old  Roman  virtue 
of  pietas,  upon  which  the  Vergilian  epic  was  so  strongly  to  insist. 

But  however  much  this  work  of  Varro  may  have  served  its  pur- 

1  Cf.  De  Civitate  Dei,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  II. 

*  J.  Wight  Duff,  A  Literary  History  of  Rome  (2d  ed.,  1910),  p.  338. 


238    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

pose,  we  find  in  the  attitude  of  Cicero  towards  him,  an  indication 
that  those  days  were  strangely  like  our  own;  that  Uterary  men 
sometimes  did  not  read  the  works  of  scholars.  Cicero  did  not  quote 
Varro,  whose  works  were  not  to  be  found  in  his  library.  His 
friend,  Atticus,  the  book-publisher  and  author,  had  them,  however, 
and  urged  Cicero  to  use  them ;  but  when  Cicero  and  Varro  both 
made  their  peace  with  Caesar  and  returned  to  their  literary  pur- 
suits, Cicero's  letters  to  Varro  are  still  general  and  somewhat 
formal.^  Even  under  the  stress  of  having  to  exchange  dedications 
to  some  of  their  works,  the  mutual  regard  of  scholar  and  man  of 
letters  is  none  too  cordial. 

This  is  all  the  more  evident  when  one  turns  to  the  httle  manual 
on  the  history  of  eloquence  which  Cicero  wrote  at  this  time,  under 
the  title  Brutus.  The  book  itself  is  of  interest  to  us,  for  it  is  the 
nearest  to  history  of  Cicero's  writings.  It  passes  in  review  about 
two  hundred  orators,  Greek  and  Roman,  but  all  in  the  form  of  a 
pleasant  dialogue,  suitably  held  under  the  statue  of  Plato  on  a 
quiet  lawn,  by  Brutus,  Atticus  and  Cicero.  But  the  incident  with 
which  it  opens  is  most  significant.  Atticus  had  written  a  short, 
general  outline  of  universal  history.  From  all  that  we  can  gather, 
it  was  a  poor  enough  affair,  an  annal  based,  like  that  of  his  pred- 
ecessor Cornelius  Nepos,^  upon  the  Athenian  chronicle  of  Apollo- 
dorus,  and  hence  in  the  direct  line  that  leads  through  Eusebius, 
to  Christian  monastic  annals.  But  it  got  away  from  the  beaten 
path  of  purely  Roman  antiquities  and  presented  the  world  as  one  j 
and  perhaps  its  very  slightness  combined  with  its  extended  perspec- 
tives constituted  its  chief  charm.  There  is  no  subtler  appeal  to 
our  intellectual  amour  propre  than  to  have  great  and  difficult  truths 
in  science  or  philosophy  made  obvious  by  keeping  us  unaware  of 
the  difiiculties.  In  any  case  Cicero  hails  this  manual  with  lyric 
joy ;  it  has  restored  his  drooping  spirits  and  made  life  worth  living 
in  these  dark  days ;  it  opens  out  the  obscurities  of  the  past  to  the 
dayhght  and  furnishes  a  sure  guide  where  all  was  so  confused  ! 
In  short,  Atticus'  outhnes  have  done  for  Cicero  what  H.  G.  Wells' 

'  Cf.  E.  G.  Sihler,  Cicero  of  Arpinum  (1914),  pp.  249,  334.  This  is  a  suggestive 
book,  crowded  with  facts,  but  hard  to  follow. 

-  Atticus'  chronicle  was  written  about  47  B.C.,  that  of  Cornelius  Nepos  about 
63  B.C.    On  Apollodorus  see  above,  p.  50,  n.  i. 


VARRO,    C^SAR   AND    SALLUST  239 

OiUline  has  done  for  the  modern  busy  reader,  led  him  to  that  "peak 
in  Darien"  where  he  might  discover  the  expanse  of  Time,  not  so 
much  with  the  shock  of  wild  surmise,  as  with  the  comfortable 
assurance  that  he  already  had  the  chart  for  its  exploration.  The 
significance  of  the  incident  is  not  that  Atticus  had  written  a  manual 
of  general  history,  but  that  Cicero  needed  it  so  badly. 

Reference  to  this  general  history  naturally  recalls  at  this  point 
the  works  of  the  later  Greek  historians  described  above,  and  we 
may  perhaps  anticipate  here  enough  to  mention  the  one  attempt 
to  carry  over  into  Latin  the  scheme  for  universal  history,  which  we 
met  first  in  Ephorus  and  Theopompus.  Pompeius  Trogus,  the 
younger  contemporary  of  Livy,  covered  the  history  of  the  near 
East  in  forty-four  books,  beginning  with  Ninus  and  including  the 
Macedonian  Empire.  The  title  of  the  work,  Uistoriae  Philippicae, 
sufficiently  indicates  the  Greek  point  of  view,  for  the  culminating 
figure  was  PhiUp  of  Macedon.  Rome  came  in  only  incidentally, 
and  rather  as  seen  by  her  enemies.  This  was  not  the  kind  of  history 
to  rival  Livy ;  and  it  would  have  perished  utterly  had  not  a  certain 
M.  Junianus  Justinus  made  a  synopsis  of  it  which  was  destined 
largely  to  satisfy  the  meagre  curiosity  of  the  Middle  Ages  in  the 
great  story  of  the  pagan  world.  For  it  was  to  this  that  Orosius, 
the  pupil  of  Augustine,  mainly  turned  for  his  materials  when 
writing  that  story  of  the  sufferings  of  the  pre-Christian  era  which 
was  the  historical  counterpart  to  the  City  of  God} 

Consideration  of  works  hke  these  has  carried  us  somewhat 
afield  from  the  main  fines  of  Roman  historiography.  But  before 
we  proceed  to  the  first  of  the  great  historians  of  Rome,  Sallust, 
whose  figure  already  stands  before  us,  we  must  pause  for  a  moment 
more  to  consider  the  historical  writings  of  another  class,  not 
scholars  this  time  but  men  of  action. 

For  in  the  controversial  atmosphere  of  late  repubfican  poHtics 
most  statesmen  who  could  write  left  narratives  to  justify  their 
conduct,  and  those  who  could  not  write  them  themselves  employed 
others  to  do  so.  The  dictator  Sulla  (138-78  B.C.)  after  his  retire- 
ment from  public  fife  wrote  an  autobiography,  which  seems  to  have 
resembled  the  semi-fabulous  narrative  of  an  Oriental  rather  than 
of  a  sober  Roman;   for  it  points  to  a  series  of  miraculous  occur- 

*  Historiarum  Adversum  Paganos  Libri  Septem. 


240    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

rences  coincident  with  his  public  work  to  show  that  the  hand  of 
the  goddess  Tyche  was  visible  throughout.^  Yet  such  a  narrative 
could  impose  upon  Plutarch.  Lucullus  also  (114-57  ^.c.)  early 
in  Ufe  wrote  a  history  of  the  war  with  Marius ;  but  the  use  of  current 
narrative  as  apologetic  pamphlet  literature  reached  its  height  in 
the  last  years  of  the  Republic,  when  Pompey  on  the  one  side  and 
Caesar  on  the  other,  defended  their  actions  at  the  bar  of  history. 
Pompey  did  not  plead  himself,  but  maintained  a  "literary  staff "^ 
to  present  his  story  in  the  Hght  of  hero-worship.  For  this  purpose 
slaves  or  Greeks  were  best ;  and  Theophanes  of  Mytilene  described 
the  third  Mithridatic  War  as  a  repetition  of  the  conquest  of  Asia 
by  Alexander,  repeating  the  hero-myth  even  down  to  a  conflict 
with  Amazons.^ 

It  is  only  when  we  turn  from  nonsense  like  this  to  Caesar's 
Commentaries  that  we  suddenly  realize  the  full  measure  of  achieve- 
ment of  these  war-memoirs.^  Few  books,  however  great,  can 
stand  the  test  of  use  in  school  and  still  retain  a  hold  upon  us  in 
later  life,  and  it  was  a  questionable  gain  to  Caesar  that  he  wrote 
in  such  simple,  lucid  phrase  as  to  make  his  works  the  object  of  the 
desolating  struggles  of  the  young  with  Latin  prose.  But  if  one  does, 
by  any  chance,  go  back  to  Caesar  after  years  of  absence  from  the 
schoolroom,  one  finds  a  surprise  awaiting  him.  For  these  works, 
written  primarily  to  justify  himself  before  the  Roman  people, 
dictated  in  camp  and  in  the  midst  of  the  world's  affairs,  contain 
not  a  word  of  open  eulogy  of  the  author,  and  present  the  narrative 
as  if  from  an  impersonal  observer,  interested  not  only  in  the  war 
but  in  the  manners  and  the  customs  of  peoples ;  in  short  a  detached, 
objective  account  such  as  Thucydides  himself  might  approve. 
This  is  the  external,  however;    for  so  happily  is  the  illusion  of 

1  It  bore  the  title  Commentarii  Rerum  Gestariim. 

2  The  expression  used  by  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit  und  Kunst,  p.  323.  See  also  his 
Die  geschichtliche  Litteratur  iiber  die  romische  Kaiserzeit  bis  Theodosius  I  und  ihre 
Quellen,  Vol.  I,  pp.  163  sqq.     Varro  wrote  for  Pompey. 

3  The  use  of  slaves  or  f reedmen  to  exalt  the  fortunes  of  the  great  was  common  in 
Rome  as  elsewhere.  But  none  of  the  achievement  is  notable  enough  to  come  within 
this  survey. 

*  Caesar's  Commentarii  are  ostensibly  merely  "sketches"  for  a  history,  to  be 
written  later ;  but  this  was  partly  a  stylistic  self-depreciation,  recognizable  among 
the  rhetorical  devices  of  the  day.  Cicero  wrote  the  account  of  his  consulate  in  the 
same  vein. 


VARRO,   C^SAR  AND   SALLUST  241 

impartiality  maintained  that  it  is  only  when  one  has  read  the  story 
through  that  one  reaHzes  the  possibility  of  another  point  of  view. 
It  was  a  work  of  genius  to  use  the  quahty  of  self-restraint  to  increase 
the  impression  of  reality,  and  so,  after  all,  to  make  what  was  left  out 
speak  for  the  writer. 

For  the  ten  or  eleven  years  following  the  murder  of  Julius 
Caesar  in  44  B.C.  there  was  living  In  retirement,  in  his  luxurious 
villa  on  the  Quirinal,  the  first  really  great  historian  whom  Rome 
produced.  Gains  Sallustius  Crispus,  knowti  to  us  as  Sallust.  He 
had  been  a  partisan  of  Caesar,  and  his  great  wealth,  which  showed 
itself  in  the  elaborate  gardens  [Jiorti  Sallustiani)  which  he  laid 
out  on  the  northern  hillsides  of  the  city,  was  probably  partly  due 
to  his  having  held  the  governorship  of  the  province  of  Numidia 
for  a  while  after  Cesar's  victories.  But  during  the  hot  factional 
fights  and  the  civil  wars  of  the  period  of  the  Triumvirate  and  the 
founding  of  the  imperial  Principate  of  Augustus,  he  withdrew  from 
present  politics  to  devote  himself  to  a  narrative  of  those  of  the  age 
which  had  just  passed  away. 

Such  a  course  of  action  needed,  in  the  eyes  of  a  practical  Roman, 
some  apology,  and  the  two  works  of  Sallust  which  have  come 
to  us  begin  with  such  apologies.  Since  they  supply  the  point  of 
view  from  which  he  wished  us  to  judge  of  his  performance,  we  may 
first  listen  to  what  he  has  to  say  on  the  matter.  The  third  and 
fourth  chapters  of  the  Conspiracy  of  Catiline  run  as  follows  :  ^ 

"  It  is  a  fine  thing  to  serve  the  State  by  action,  nor  is  eloquence  despicable. 
Men  may  become  illustrious  alike  in  peace  and  war,  and  many  by  their 
own  acts,  many  by  their  record  of  the  acts  of  others,  win  applause.  The 
glory  which  attends  the  doer  and  the  recorder  of  brave  deeds  is  certainly  by 
no  means  equal.  For  my  own  part,  however,  I  count  historical  narration  as 
one  of  the  hardest  of  tasks.  In  the  first  place,  a  full  equivalent  has  to  be  found 
in  words  for  the  deeds  narrated,  and  in  the  second  the  historian's  censures  of 
crimes  are  by  many  thought  to  be  the  utterances  of  ill-will  and  envy,  while 
his  record  of  the  high  virtue  and  glory  of  the  good,  tranquilly  accepted  so  long 
as  it  deals  with  what  th  reader  deems  to  be  easily  within  his  own  powers, 
so  soon  as  it  passes  beyond  this  is  disbelieved  as  mere  invention. 

"  As  regards  myself,  my  inclination  originally  led  me,  like  many  others, 
while  still  a  youth,  into  public  life.     There  I  found  many  things  against  me. 

»  The  Catiline  of  Sallust  {The  Conspiracy  of  Catiline),  English  translation  by 
A.  W.  Pollard  (1886 ;  2d  ed.,  1891 ;  reprinted  1913). 


242    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Modesty,  temperance,  and  merit  had  departed,  and  hardihood,  corruption, 
and  avarice  were  flourishing  in  their  stead.  My  mind,  a  stranger  to  bad 
acquirements,  contemned  these  quahties;^  nevertheless,  with  the  weakness 
of  my  youth,  I  was  seized  and  held  amid  this  throng  of  vices  by  ambition.  I 
presented  a  contrast  to  the  iU  behaviour  of  my  fellows,  none  the  less  I  was 
tormented  by  the  same  craving  for  the  honours  of  ofl&ce,  and  the  same 
sensitiveness  to  popularity  and  unpopularity  as  the  rest. 

"  At  last,  after  many  miseries  and  perils,  my  mind  was  at  peace,  and  I  de- 
termined to  pass  the  remainder  of  my  days  at  a  distance  from  public  affairs. 
It  was  not,  however,  my  plan  to  waste  this  honourable  leisure  in  idleness  and 
sloth,  nor  yet  to  spend  my  life  in  devotion  to  such  slavish  tastes  as  agriculture 
or  hunting.  I  returned  to  the  studies  I  had  once  begun,  from  which  my  un- 
happy ambition  had  held  me  back,  and  determined  to  narrate  the  history  of 
the  Roman  people  in  separate  essays,  wherever  it  seemed  worthy  of  record. 
I  was  the  more  inclined  to  this  by  the  fact  that  my  mind  was  free  alike  from 
the  hopes  and  fears  of  the  political  partisan." 

In  his  other  book,  The  Jugurthine  War^  Sallust  is  even  more  on 

the  defensive : 

"  Among  the  tasks  that  occupy  the  intellect,  historical  narration  holds 
a  prominent  and  useful  place.  As  its  merits  have  been  often  extolled,  I  think 
it  best  to  leave  them  unmentioned,  and  thus  escape  any  imputation  of  arro- 
gantly exalting  myself  by  praise  of  my  own  pursuit.  And  yet  I  have  no  doubt 
that  there  will  be  some  who,  because  I  have  determined  to  pass  my  life  at 
a  distance  from  public  affairs,  will  apply  the  name  of  indolence  to  my  long  and 
useful  task.  At  any  rate,  the  men  to  whom  it  seems  the  height  of  energy  to 
court  the  mob,  and  buy  favour  by  their  pubUc  entertainments,  will  do  so." 

In  both  these  sections  his  defence  involves  a  characterization 
of  the  politics  of  Rome  —  the  other  alternative  field  for  his  activity 
—  which  is,  in  a  word,  the  essence  of  his  history  as  well.  For  he 
dealt  as  a  historian  with  just  that  corrupt  and  vicious  political  life 
of  the  closing  years  of  the  Republic,  from  which  he  sought  refuge 
in  the  polite  society  of  his  friends  and  the  delights  of  intellectual 
intercourse.  The  choice  of  the  conspiracy  of  Catiline  for  a  subject 
to  be  immortalized,  revealing  —  as  it  did  in  his  depiction  —  the 
degradation  of  Roman  ideals  and  the  failure  of  its  social  as  well  as 
of  its  political  system,  was  typical  of  his  outlook.  The  story  of  the 
war  against  Jugurtha,  his  other  theme,  has  a  constantly  recurring 

'  Sallust's  life,  before  his  retirement,  by  no  means  escaped  criticism ;  but  we  are 
not  concerned  here  with  questions  of  private  morals. 
^  Sallust,  Bellum  Jugurthinum,  Chap.  IV. 


VARRO,   C^SAR  AND    SALLUST  243 

note  as  to  the  venality  of  Roman  senators,  and  if  we  lose  the  thread 
of  home  affairs  in  the  graphic  —  though  sometimes  fanciful — descrip- 
tions of  battle  in  the  wilds  of  Numidia,  the  climax  of  the  tale  is  less 
the  fate  of  Jugurtha  than  that  striking  passage  which  closed  the 
disreputable  manoeuvres  of  the  king  and  his  partisans  in  Rome, 
in  which,  as  he  was  leaving  the  city,  "he  is  said,  after  looking  back 
at  it  in  silence,  at  last  to  have  cried :  'a  city  for  sale,  soon  to  fall  if 
once  it  find  a  buyer.'  "  ^  There  is  no  wonder  that  in  dealing  with 
characters  and  events  such  as  these  Sallust  should  find  history 
difficult. 

But  the  difficulty  was  enhanced  by  the  fact  that  he  never  quite 
saw  the  perspective  as  a  historian.  He  was  intent  upon  preserving 
"the  memory  of  gallant  deeds  that  kindled  a  fire  in  the  breasts  of 
brave  men,  that  cannot  be  quenched  until  their  own  merit  has 
rivalled  their  ancestors'  fame  and  renown,"  ^  and  so  he  sought  to 
bring  out,  partly  by  contrast,  against  that  dark  background,  the 
patriotism  of  a  Cato  or  the  military  genius  of  a  Metellus.  Yet  he 
was  too  much  of  a  historian  to  do  this  at  the  expense  of  the  narrative 
as  a  whole ;  the  episodes  are  not  allowed  to  dominate  as  they  would 
in  the  case  of  a  mere  writer  of  memoirs.  The  attempt  to  be  im- 
partial prevents  him  from  that  brilliant  sort  of  sketching  which 
would  have  distorted  the  narrative  for  the  sake  of  a  few  strong 
effects.  On  the  other  hand,  the  background  never  becomes  really 
clear.  He  did  not  set  himself,  in  these  works  at  least,  the  larger 
theme,  of  which  they  furnished  the  notable  illustrations,  —  the 
theme  of  Roman  government  in  the  days  when  an  outworn  oligarchy 
was  attempting  to  rule  through  an  outworn  constitution,  and  the 
democratic  statesmen  had  not  yet  found  their  Caesar. 

If,  therefore,  there  is  something  inherently  weak  about  the  work 
of  Sallust,  why  is  it  held  in  such  high  regard  ?  For,  not  only  have 
we  the  praise  of  the  one  most  competent  to  pass  judgment  in  Rome, 
Tacitus  himself,^  but  modern  critics  are  agreed  that  Sallust  stands 
head  and  shoulders  above  his  predecessors,  and  remains,  with  Livy 
and  Tacitus,  one  of  the  three  really  great  Latin  historians.  The 
reason  is  mainly  that  he  applied  to  Rome  the  standards  of  Thu- 
cydides  and  Polybius,  whom  he  took  as  his  masters ;  and,  cutting 

Ubid.,  Chap.  XXXV.  = /6/c/.,  Chap.  IV. 

3  Tacitus,  Annates,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  XXX. 


244    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

adrift  from  the  current  of  complacent  rhetorical  compositions, 
honestly  tried  to  tell  the  truth.  Moreover,  in  style  as  well  as  in 
content,  he  held  himself  aloof  from  the  florid  or  oratorical  traditions 
and  wrote  with  dignity  and  gave  a  certain  fitting,  archaic  flavor 
to  his  narrative.^  Like  Thucydides,  he  polished  and  repolished  his 
phrases ;  and  the  speeches  he  introduced,  even  when  he  had  the 
text  before  him,^  were  rewritten  in  keeping  with  the  rest  of  his 
work.  Fortunately  one  orator,  Cicero,  saved  him  the  trouble  of  so 
doing  with  his  particular  orations,  by  rewriting  and  polishing  them 
for  posterity  himself. 

It  is  generally  held  that  one  of  Sallust's  chief  merits  is  his 
depiction  of  character ;  and  it  is  true  that  his  characters  are  for  the 
most  part  drawn  with  real  impartiality  and  are  life-like.  But  the 
qualities  assigned  them  seem  to  smack  a  little  of  formula ;  they  are 
not  subtle  combinations  of  temperament  and  capacity,  capable 
of  swiftly  surprising  the  reader,  but  share  that  element  of  the 
commonplace  which  makes  so  much  of  antique  literature  seem  more 
or  less  like  stage-property.^  However,  it  is  open  to  the  classicist 
to  take  exception  to  this,  for  the  full  merit  and  charm  of  Sallust's 
art  demand  more  time  and  study  than  his  subject-matter  makes 
otherwise  profitable. 

Finally,  there  are  two  frank  weaknesses  in  Sallust  as  a  historian. 
In  the  first  place  he  is  weak  in  chronology  and  geography.  His 
editors  have  all  pointed  out  how  incredibly  careless  he  is  in  both 
respects.  He  uses  vague  phrases  for  lapse  of  time  and  even  then 
gets  hopelessly  wrong,  while  his  geography  of  Africa  is  a  fanciful 
bit  of  writing,  such  as  putting  cities  near  the  coast  that  should 
be  forty  miles  inland.  This  would  have  shocked  Polybius, 
and  if  Sallust  found  Thucydides  vague  in  his  time-reckoning, 
Thucydides  would  have  never  failed,  as  Sallust  did,  where  the  data 
were  at  hand. 

*  A  good  example  of  a  deftly  turned  phrase,  even  were  it  not  original,  is  the  crisp 
comment  on  the  Numidians  who  were  "protected  rather  by  their  feet  than  by  their 
swords"  (Bellum  Jiigurthinum,  Chap.  LXXIV). 

2  As  for  instance  that  of  Cato  against  Catiline  or  Memmius  against  Jugurtha. 
His  speeches  are  admittedly  well  done,  and  if  there  are  too  many  for  us,  and  the 
moralizing  is  overdone,  they  suited  the  age  for  which  they  were  written. 

^  The  portrait  of  Marius  is  perhaps  an  exception.  CJ.  Sallust,  Bellum  Jugurthi- 
num,  Chap.  LXIII  et  seq. 


VARRO,    C^SAR   AND    SALLUST  245 

The  second  weakness  of  Sallust  came  from  his  very  advantages, 
A  retired  capitalist,  living  in  elegant  ease,  employing  scholars  to 
do  the  drudgery  of  research/  he  missed  some  of  that  keen  sense  of 
the  value  of  accuracy  which  comes  from  constantly  feeling  the 
iron  discipline  of  the  scientific  method.  But,  more  than  this,  he 
saw  the  world  much  as  such  a  one  would  today,  through  the 
windows  of  a  Pall  Mall  or  Fifth  Avenue  club.  His  philosophy, 
which  he  outlines  in  his  prefaces,  is  one  of  self-denial,  but  it  is  the 
kind  of  self-denial  that  goes  with  club-life.  It  reminds  one  of 
Polonius.  It  does  not  reach  out  to  grapple  with  the  real  problems 
of  a  work-a-day  world.  It  is  placid  and  sure  of  itself,  properly 
censorious,  but  lacking  in  grasp  of  fundamentals. 

If  Sallust's  other  work,  a  history  of  the  whole  era  just  preceding 
his  own,  was  ever  finished  or  not,^  we  have  traces  of  only  a  few 
fragments ;  and  the  fact  that  he  proposed  to  concentrate  on  certain 
main  features,  as  a  rule  for  historical  composition,  leads  us  to  sur- 
mise that  his  performance  in  the  larger  task  was  hardly  one  to  cause 
us  to  revise  our  judgment  upon  him.  Yet  he  may  have  suffered 
from  the  fact  that  in  the  ages  that  followed,  particularly  in  the 
closing  period  of  imperial  history,  it  was  the  charm  of  his  style 
and  the  power  of  his  portrayal  which  preserved  for  us  what  it 
did,  rather  than  any  more  solid  merit  in  historical  synthesis. 

'  He  employed  scholars  to  do  the  "grubbing"  for  him.  Suetonius,  De  Illustrihis 
Grammalicis,  Chap.  X.  Yet  he  should  get  due  credit  for  recognizing  the  value  of 
scholarly  aids.  "  Such  pains  were  seldom  taken  by  a  Latin  historian."  Cf.  J.  W. 
Mackail,  Latin  Literature  (1895  ;  reprinted  1907),  p.  84. 

2  It  bore  the  title  Historiae,  and  apparently  covered  from  about  78  to  66  B.C., 
continuing  where  L.  Cornelius  Sisenna  had  left  off.  Vide  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op. 
cit.,  Vol,  I,  Sect.  205,  n.  4.     On  Sisenna  see  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit  und  Kunst,  p.  301. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  philological  work  of  Varro  has  been  brought  out  by  G.  Goetz  and 
F.  Schoell,  De  Lingua  Latina  Quae  Super  sunt  (Teubner,  1910) ;  but  the  student 
of  history  should  consult  H.  Peter,  Historicorum  Romanorum  Reliquiae  (2  vols., 
1906-1914),  Vol.  II,  for  the  fragments  which  are  of  historiographical  interest. 
For  bibliography  see  Jahreshericht  tiber  die  Fortschritte  dcr  klassischen  Altcr- 
tumswissenschaft,  Vol.  CXLIII  (1910),  pp.  63  sqq.,  for  1898-1908;  Sup.  Vol 
CLXV  (i9i3),"pp.  307  sqq.;  Vol.  CLXXIII  (1915),  P-  Qi ;  Vol.  CLXXVII 
(1916-1918),  pp.  89  sq.,  p.  254, 

There  are  editions  of  Caesar's  Comtnentarii  by  B.  Kiibler  (3  vols.,  ed.  maior, 


246    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Teubner,  1893-1897;  ed.  minor,  Teubner,  1897-1911);  E.  Hoflfmann  (2  vols., 
3d  ed.,  1898) ;  B.  Dinter  (3  vols.,  Teubner,  1864,  1890) ;  T.  R.  Holmes  (1914) ; 
E.  S.  Shuckburgh  (1912-1915);  R.  Du  Pontet  (Oxford  Library  of  Classical 
Authors,  2  vols.  [1900-1901]).  There  is  a  large  literature  on  Caesar  but  the 
translations  of  The  Gallic  War  by  H.  J.  Edwards  (1917),  The  Civil  Wars  by 
A.  G.  Peskett  (1914),  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  and  the  works  of  T.  R. 
Holmes,  Ancient  Britain  and  the  Invasion  of  Julius  Ccesar  (1907),  Ccesafs 
Conquest  of  Gaul  (2d  ed.,  1911),  will  furnish  the  best  introduction.  See  also 
E.  G.  Sihler,  Annals  of  Casar  (1911).  For  general  Uterature  see  Jahreshericht, 
etc..  Sup.  Vol.  CLVI  (191 2),  pp.  168  sqq. 

Of  the  various  editions  of  Sallust  the  following  may  be  mentioned :  T.  Opitz 
(2d  ed.,  Teubner,  1909) ;  A.  Eussner  (Catilina,  De  Bello  Jugurthino,  Teubner 
1887  ;  new  ed.,  191 2) ;  J.  H.  Schmalz  {Catilina,  8th  ed.,  1909  ;  De  Bello  Jugur- 
thino, 8th.  ed.,  igi  2) ;  C.  Stegmann  (Catilina,  Teubner,  4th  ed.,  1914;  De 
Bello  Jugurthino,  Teubner,  3d  ed.,  1915).  There  are  translations  by  A.  W. 
Pollard,  The  Catiline  of  Sallust  (1886;  2d  ed.,  1891,  reprinted  1913),  and  by 
J.  C.  Rolfe,  Sallust  ....  (1921),  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library.  The  bibliog- 
raphies in  the /oAre^feen'c/f/,  etc.,  are  in  Vol.  CLX  (1912),  p.  64;  Sup.  Vol. 
CLXV  (1913),  pp.  165  sqq.;   Vol.  CLXXVII  (1916-1918),  pp.  84,  248. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

LIVY 

Whatever  opinions  one  may  have  as  to  the  place  of  Sallust 
among  historians,  that  of  Livy  remains  unchallenged.  He  was 
the  national  historian  of  Rome ;  the  only  one  who  successfully 
handled  the  long  and  intricate  story  of  war  and  politics  from  the 
establishment  of  the  City  to  that  of  the  Empire.  Others  worked 
at  portions ;  he  took  over  the  whole.  Even  in  mere  size  his  history 
was  monumental.  It  had  no  less  than  one  hundred  forty-two 
books ;  and  a  book  in  Livy  is  not  like  the  meagre  divisions  of 
Caesar's  Commentaries ;  it  is  a  small  work  in  itself.  But  apart 
from  its  vastness,  the  conception  which  underlay  the  history  of  Livy 
was  so  consistently  developed,  the  outlines  of  his  structure  so  clear 
and  so  harmonious,  that  it  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that  it  was  the 
impress  which  he  gave  to  the  history  of  the  Republic  that  lasted 
down  to  the  day  of  Niebuhr  and  the  nineteenth  century  critics.  He 
carried  the  idea  of  the  fated  mission  of  Rome  as  the  unifying  centre 
of  the  civilized  world  back  across  the  centuries  of  its  obscurity,  and 
linked  together  past,  present  and  future  in  one  culminating  perspec- 
tive. In  a  sense  it  was  merely  the  reflection  in  history  of  the  greatness 
of  the  writer's  own  times.  But  the  fact  that  those  times  were  great 
made  the  faith  in  Rome  itself,  —  which  was  Livy's  creed,  —  almost 
the  same  as  a  belief  in  human  progress  or  a  vital  interest  in  organized 
society.  Thus  his  patriotism  became  catholic,  and  remained  an 
inspiration  to  succeeding  ages,  even  after  the  Roman  world  had 
passed  away.^  Whatever  criticism  may  have  to  say  as  to  his 
methods  of  work,  it  cannot  shake  the  place  of  Livy  as  one  of  those 
few  historians  whose  works  have  lived  rather  than  endured.   Judged 

'  Cf.  A.  Molinier,  Les  sources  de  Vhistoire  de  France,  Vol.  I,  p.  36,  for  the  influence 
of  Livy's  perspective  upon  the  historical  ideas  of  the  Middle  Ages.  This  influence, 
however,  was  rather  indirect,  while  from  the  days  of  the  humanists  to  our  own  Livy 
has  again  his  place  among  "the  classics." 

247 


248    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

in  this  light,  the  national  historian  of  Rome  stands  high  among  the 
old  masters. 

Titus  Livius  (59  B.C.-17  a.d.)  was  born  at  Padua,  but  passed 
most  of  his  life  at  Rome,  and  wrote  under  the  direct  patronage  of 
Augustus.  Indeed,  he  represented  in  history  that  effort  toward 
reform  in  morals,  in  which  Augustus  was  so  much  concerned,  by 
the  strong  emphasis  which  he  placed  upon  the  ancient  virtues  and 
the  depiction  of  heroic  acts  and  patriotic  sacrifice.^  But  the  very 
sincerity  of  character,  which  revealed  itself  in  this  moral  attitude  of 
Livy,  kept  him  independent  in  spirit,  so  that  although  at  court  he 
was  no  courtier.  He  did  not,  like  Horace  and  Vergil,  place  Augustus 
among  the  gods,  and  indeed  only  mentioned  him  incidentally, 
''once  to  mark  a  date,  again  to  prove  a  fact."  ^  On  the  other  hand, 
he  ventured  to  praise  Brutus  and  Cassius.^  A  sturdy  provincial, 
without  any  of  the  ties  that  made  partisanship  a  family  virtue,  he 
came  to  Rome  just  when  the  hot  feuds  of  the  latter  Republic  were 
quenched  in  the  great  civil  wars,  and  the  era  of  corruption  and 
intrigue  which  obscured  the  perspectives  of  Sallust  was  apparently 
over.  Consequently,  without  surrendering  his  republican  principles, 
he  could  see  in  the  Principate  a  continuation  of  these  elements 
in  the  Roman  past  which  made  for  greatness.  But  while  his 
character  and  outlook  are  clearly  shown  in  his  works  and  in  the  few 
references  we  have  concerning  his  life,  those  references  are  so  few 
that,  as  in  the  case  of  Herodotus,  we  are  left  with  a  history  rather 
than  a  historian.  As  Taine  has  somewhat  sententiously  summed 
it  up :  "A  date  in  Eusebius,  some  details  scattered  in  Seneca  and 
Quintilian,  two  words  thrown  by  chance  in  his  own  work ;  that  is 
all  that  is  left  us  on  the  life  of  Titus  Livius.  The  historian  of 
Rome  has  no  history."  ^  The  fragments  we  have  show  him  to 
have  been  modest  in  the  midst  of  his  vast  popularity ;  ^  his  work 

^  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit  und  Kunst,  p.  352. 

^  H.  Taine,  Essai  sur  Tile  Live  (1856),  p.  6. 

3  Cf.  Tacitus,  Annales,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XXXIV. 

*  H.  Taine,  Essai  sur  Tile  Live,  p.  i. 

^  The  younger  Pliny  tells  us  a  striking  story,  apparently  current  in  his  day, 
which  sufl&ciently  indicates  the  contemporary  fame  of  Livy.  "  Have  you  never  read 
(he  says  to  Nepos)  about  a  certain  man  from  Cadiz,  who  came  from  the  very  end  of 
the  world  to  see  Livy,  moved  thereto  by  the  latter's  name  and  fame,  and  immediately 
after  seeing  him  went  back  home  again?  "     Cf.  Epislida,  Bk.  II,  Letter  3. 


LIVY  249 

reveals  the  fact  that  he  travelled  little  and  read  much ;  and  his 
style  bears  the  marks  of  the  training  of  a  rhetor.  In  other  words 
he  was  a  cultured  gentleman  of  studious  habits.  Beyond  that  we 
can  hardly  go. 

When  we  turn  from  the  man  to  the  history,  we  may  as  well 
begin  at  the  beginning  and  let  Livy  describe  his  purpose  and  his 
conception  of  the  work,  as  he  does,  frankly  enough,  in  the  Preface 
to  the  A  b  Urbe  Condita : 

"  Whether  the  task  I  have  undertaken  of  writing  a  complete  history  of  the 
Roman  people  from  the  very  commencement  of  its  existence  will  reward  me 
for  the  labour  spent  on  it,  I  neither  know  for  certain,  nor  if  I  did  know  would 
I  venture  to  say.  For  I  see  that  this  is  an  old-established  and  a  common 
practice,  each  fresh  writer  being  invariably  persuaded  that  he  will  either  attain 
greater  certainty  in  the  materials  of  his  narrative  or  surpass  the  rudeness  of 
antiquity  in  the  excellence  of  his  style. 

"  However  this  may  be,  it  will  still  be  a  great  satisfaction  to  me  to  have 
taken  my  part,  too,  in  investing,  to  the  utmost  of  my  abilities,  the  annals  of 
the  foremost  nation  in  the  world  with  a  deeper  interest ;  and  if  in  such  a  crowd 
of  writers  my  own  reputation  is  thrown  into  the  shade,  I  would  console  myself 
with  the  renown  and  greatness  of  those  who  eclipse  my  fame. 

"  The  subject  moreover  is  one  that  demands  immense  labour.  It  goes  back 
beyond  700  years,  and,  starting  from  small  and  humble  beginnings,  has  grown 
to  such  dimensions  that  it  begins  to  be  overburdened  by  its  greatness.  I  have 
very  little  doubt,  too,  that  for  the  majority  of  my  readers,  the  earliest  times 
and  those  immediately  succeeding  will  possess  little  attraction ;  they  will 
hurry  on  to  those  modern  days  in  which  the  might  of  a  long  paramount  nation 
is  wasting  by  internal  decay.  I,  on  the  other  hand,  shall  look  for  a  further 
reward  of  my  labours  in  being  able  to  close  my  eyes  to  the  evils  which  our 
generation  has  witnessed  for  so  many  years ;  so  long,  at  least,  as  I  am  devoting 
all  my  thoughts  to  retracing  those  pristine  records,  free  from  all  the  anxiety 
which  can  disturb  the  historian  of  his  own  times  even  if  it  cannot  warp  him 
from  the  truth. 

"  The  traditions  of  what  happened  prior  to  the  foundation  of  the  City,  or 
whilst  it  was  being  built,  are  more  fitted  to  adorn  the  creations  of  the  poet  than 
the  authentic  records  of  the  historian,  and  I  have  no  intention  of  establishing 
either  their  truth  or  their  falsehood.  This  much  licence  is  conceded  to  the 
ancients,  that  by  intermingling  human  actions  with  divine  they  may  confer 
a  more  august  dignity  on  the  origins  of  states.  Now,  if  any  nation  ought  to 
be  allowed  to  claim  a  sacred  origin  and  point  back  to  divine  paternity,  that 
nation  is  Rome.  For  such  is  her  renown  in  war  that  when  she  chooses  to 
represent  Mars  as  her  own  and  her  founder's  father,  the  nations  of  the  world 
accept  the  statement  with  the  same  equanimity  with  which  they  accept  her 
dominion. 


250    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

"But  whatever  opinions  may  be  formed  or  criticisms  passed  upon  these  and 
similar  traditions,  I  regard  them  as  of  small  importance.  The  subjects  to 
which  I  would  ask  each  of  my  readers  to  devote  his  earnest  attention  are 
these  —  the  life  and  morals  of  the  community ;  the  men  and  the  qualities  by 
which,  through  domestic  policy  and  foreign  war,  dominion  was  won  and  ex- 
tended. Then,  as  the  standard  of  morality  gradually  lowers,  let  him  follow 
the  decay  of  the  national  character,  observing  how  at  first  it  slowly  sinks,  then 
slips  downward  more  and  more  rapidly,  and  finally  begins  to  plunge  into  head- 
long ruin,  until  he  reaches  those  days  in  which  we  can  bear  neither  our  diseases 
nor  their  remedies. 

"There  is  this  exceptionally  beneficial  and  fruitful  advantage  to  be  derived 
from  the  study  of  the  past,  that  you  see,  set  in  the  clear  light  of  historical  truth, 
examples  of  every  possible  type.  From  these  you  may  select  for  yourself 
and  your  country  what  to  imitate,  and  what,  as  being  mischievous  in  its  in- 
ception and  disastrous  in  its  issue,  you  are  to  avoid.  Unless,  however,  I  am 
misled  by  affection  for  my  undertaking,  there  has  never  existed  any  common- 
wealth greater  in  power,  with  a  purer  morality,  or  more  fertile  in  good  examples  ; 
or  any  state  in  which  avarice  and  luxury  have  been  so  late  in  making  their 
inroads,  or  poverty  and  frugality  so  highly  and  continuously  honoured,  showing 
so  clearly  that  the  less  wealth  men  possessed  the  less  they  coveted.  In  these 
latter  years  wealth  has  brought  avarice  in  its  train,  and  the  unlimited  command 
of  pleasure  has  created  in  men  a  passion  for  ruining  themselves  and  everything 
else  through  self-indulgence  and  licentiousness. 

"  But  criticisms  which  will  be  unwelcome,  even  when  perhaps  necessary, 
must  not  appear  in  the  commencement,  at  all  events,  of  this  extensive  work. 
We  should  much  prefer  to  start  with  favourable  omens,  and  if  we  could  have 
adopted  the  poets'  custom,  it  would  have  been  much  pleasanter  to  commence 
with  prayers  and  supplications  to  gods  and  goddesses  that  they  would  grant 
a  favourable  and  successful  issue  to  the  great  task  before  us."  ^ 

Nowhere  else  in  antique  historiography  have  we  so  winning 
an  appeal.  It  has  the  personal  note  of  Polybius  without  his 
pedagogical  airs,  the  moral  atmosphere  of  SaUust  but  not  his 
censorious  declamation,  and  a  promise  of  the  charm  of  a  Herodotus 
in  the  logi  about  old,  forgotten  things  that  take  the  mind  off  the 
sordid  cares  of  the  present.  The  light  touch  which  brings  one 
at  the  close  to  the  borderland  that  lies  between  humor  and  poetry, 
shows  at  once  the  sure  hand  of  a  master.  The  omens  are  favorable 
when  the  historian  has  in  mind  the  frailties  of  his  readers  to  the  point 

*  Translation  by  W.  M.  Roberts  in  the  edition  of  Livy  in  Everyman's  Library 
(3  vols.,  1912).  The  translator  has  succeeded  in  giving  the  sense  of  Livy's  ease  of 
style  but  hardly  his  compression.    The  Latin  is  about  half  the  length  of  the  English. 


LIVY  251 

of  not  recalling  them  unduly,  but  can  leave  the  heroic  past  to 
convey  its  own  lesson. 

The  history  of  Livy  bore  the  simple  title,  From  the  Foundation 
of  the  City  (Ab  Urbe  Condita),  and  it  properly  begins  with  ^neas, 
whose  deeds  are  hurriedly  sketched  on  the  basis  of  the  "generally 
accepted"  legend.^  There  is  little  indication  of  enthusiasm  for 
this  or  the  story  of  Romulus  which  follows.  There  is  even  a  rising 
doubt  as  to  the  divine  paternity  of  the  founder  of  Rome  and  a 
naturalistic  alternative  to  the  tales  about  him.  Indeed,  the  nar- 
rative hardly  gets  under  way  in  the  legends  of  origin.  It  is  not 
until  we  have  the  struggle  of  Rome  against  Alba  Longa,  culminating 
in  the  dramatic  duel  of  the  three  Horatii  against  the  Curiatii,^ 
that  we  are  conscious  of  the  swing  of  unfettered  movement  and  the 
play  of  the  historical  imagination.  The  problem  of  origins  is  left 
unsolved ;  the  case  is  given  away  to  neither  the  credulous  nor  the 
skeptical;  details  hardly  matter;  for  in  any  case,  says  Livy,  "in 
my  opinion,  the  origin  of  so  great  a  city  and  the  establishment  of 
an  empire  next  in  power  to  that  of  the  gods  was  due  to  the  Fates."  ^ 

This  at  once  suggests  the  phase  of  Livy's  history  which  is  most 
open  to  question  in  our  eyes.  It  is  so  religious  in  tone  as  to  be 
frankly  mediaeval  in  the  inclusion  of  the  supernatural  as  an  in- 
trinsic part  of  the  human  story,  and  especially  in  the  handling  of 
crises,  when  by  miracle  or  portent  the  gods  reveal  themselves. 
Omens  and  prodigies  abound ;  when  the  gods  are  not  on  the  scene 
they  are  just  behind  it.  Herodotus  by  comparison  is  almost 
modern,  for,  although  the  oracles  play  a  great  part  in  his  narrative, 
the  gods  remain  aloof.  Livy,  on  the  contrary,  in  the  spirit  of 
Augustus'  religious  reforms, "*  made  piety  the  very  core  of  patriotism. 
There  is  a  flavor  of  Stoic  doctrine,  as  Pelham  points  out,  in  the  way 
in  which  Fate  "  disposes  the  plans  of  men,^  and  blinds  their 
minds,^  yet  leaves  their  wills  free."  ^     But  the  philosopher  yields 

^Livy,  Ab  Urbe  Condita,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I.  The  division  into  books  is  by  the 
author  (cf.  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  I,  i) ;  that  into  decades  or  sets  of  ten  books  is  a  later  device. 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXV.  '  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  IV. 

'  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XIX. 

^  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XLIl. 

Ubid.,  Bk.  V,  Chap.  XXXVII. 

^/6J(f.,Bk.  XXXVII,  Chap.  XLV;  H.  F.  Pelham,  article  Livy,  in  Encyclopadia 
Britannica. 


252     INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

to  the  historian,  as  he  relates  the  narratives,  in  the  way  he  finds 
them  in  his  sources,  and  reahzes  how  fully  his  characters  believed 
in  all  the  apparatus  of  ofiicial  magic,  and  the  uncanny  presences  that 
heralded  disaster  or  victory.  In  a  sentence  which  is  practically  un- 
matched in  antique  history  for  penetrating  historical  imagination, 
he  admits  the  influence  which  the  old  faiths  exert  over  him  as  he 
sinks  himself  into  the  past  and  learns  to  think  and  feel  the  way 
his  ancient  heroes  did.  "In  narrating  ancient  things,"  he  says, 
"my  soul,  I  know  not  how,  becomes  antique,  and  when  I  see 
men  so  wise  treat  these  events  as  affairs  of  state,  I  have  scruples 
at  finding  them  unworthy  my  annals."  ^  This  is  certainly  the 
most  that  can  be  said  in  his  defence.  If  the  gods  reveal  the 
future,  as  they  do  in  the  instance  which  calls  forth  this  aside, 
they  are  moving  in  the  pages  of  Livy  as  they  did  through  the 
brains  of  his  heroes,  and  to  that  degree  the  supernatural  is  the 
more  natural  history. 

The  story  of  Rome  was  one  of  constant  war,  and  Livy  is  at  his 
best  describing  campaigns  and  battle  scenes.  A  man  of  letters 
and  not  a  soldier  himself,  he  is  deficient  in  military  science  and 
inaccurate  in  geography  ,2  and  his  sense  of  numbers  is  poor ;  yet 
his  narrative  of  action  is  nervous,  swift  and  forceful.  While  in 
argumentative  sections  his  style  is  often  involved  and  some- 
times drags,  here  he  has  the  art  of  securing  speed  and  yet  combining 
it  with  the  picturesque.  The  only  thing  that  spoils  his  best  portions 
is  the  chance  that  he  will  interrupt  them  to  insert  just  such  an  argu- 
ment in  the  shape  of  interminable  speeches  or  harangues.  These 
were  undoubtedly,  in  Livy's  eyes,  the  high  points  of  his  art ;  for 
the  influence  of  Isocrates,  or  at  least  of  that  form  of  rhetoric  which 
Romans  most  admired,  was  dominant  in  his  style.  There  are  over 
four  hundred  speeches  in  the  thirty-five  books  which  have  come 
down  to  us,  and  they  were  adjudged,  by  no  less  a  critic  than  Quin- 
tilian,  to  be  unsurpassed  in  diction  and  content.^  It  must  be  ad- 
mitted, indeed,  that  they  are  not  vapid  declamations  but  real, 
characteristic  speeches ;  but  they  are  often  long  and  labored. 

1  Livy,  Ab  Urbe  Condita,  Bk.  XLIII,  Chap.  XIII. 

2  His  battle  scenes  do  not  work  out  on  the  actual  map.  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Wahrheit 
und  Kunst,  p.  356. 

3  H.  Peter,  op.  ciL,  p.  356. 


LIVY  253 

It  was  not  the  speeches  which  Livy  feared  might  drive  readers 
away,  but  the  long  succession  of  the  wars  themselves.  After  ten 
books  of  them  he  is  moved  to  exhort  the  tired  reader  to  continue 
as  a  patriotic  task : 

"  What  sort  of  a  man  must  he  be  who  would  find  the  long  story  of  those  wars 
tedious,  though  he  is  only  narrating  or  reading  it,  when  they  failed  to  wear  out 
those  who  were  actually  engaged  in  them?  "  ^ 

In  this  apprehension  Livy  was  justified.  It  was  the  greatest 
tribute  to  his  genius  that  antiquity  preserved,  well  into  the  Middle 
Ages,  so  vast  a  repertory  of  archaic  wars.  If  only  relatively  small 
portions  of  the  great  work  have  come  down  to  us,^  it  was  not  until 
those  dark  ages  after  the  seventh  century  that  the  missing  books 
disappeared,  and  even  some  parts  of  them  are  preserved  in  extracts 
by  later  authors.  Why  the  long  story  of  obscure  struggles  was 
preserved  when  so  much  more  important  parts  were  lost  is  of  course 
impossible  to  say ;  but  perhaps  the  historian's  love  for  those  quaint, 
far-off  days  had  something  to  do  in  preserving  them. 

When  we  turn  from  the  art  of  Livy  to  his  criticism  and  use  of 
sources,  we  at  once  come  upon  his  weakness.  Criticism  was  con- 
trary to  his  nature.  He  was  a  narrator.  He  gives  one  the  im- 
pression that  he  used  criticism  only  superficially  and  because  it 
was  the  fashion.^  He  did  not  discriminate  among  his  sources,  but 
took  what  best  fitted  with  the  scheme  of  the  story.  Pictor  and 
Polybius  ^  were  used,  but  not  consistently.  Second-hand  annalists 
were  good  enough  so  long  as  they  contained  the  data.  While 
hardly  going  so  far  as  to  apply  the  adage  se  non  e  vero  e  ben  trovato, 
Livy  did  not  interest  himself  in  those  researches  in  either  philology 
or  antiquarian  lore  which  the  new  scholarship  of  his  day  had  made 
available.  It  is  enough  to  say  that  he  shows  no  trace  of  having 
read  Varro.^ 

There  are,  however,  signs  of  the  distinct  sense  of  dependence 

1  Bk.  X,  Chap.  XXXI.  Cf.  also  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  XII,  "I  have  no  doubt  that  my 
readers  will  be  tired  of  such  a  long  record  of  incessant  wars  with  the  Volscians." 

2  The  extant  books  are  I-X,  XXI-XLV,  of  which  XLI  and  XLIII  are  incomplete. 
'  H.  Peter,  op.  cit.,p.  356. 

*  Polybius  was  used  for  the  Greek  and  Oriental  history  in  the  thirtieth  book ; 
but  he  had  nothing  so  good  for  Rome.  Vide  W.  Soltau,  Livms'  Geschichlswerk,  seine 
Komposition  und  seine  Quellen  (1897). 

^  CJ.  H.  F.  Pelham,  article  Livy,  in  Encyclopadia  Britannica. 


254    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

upon  the  sources  which  he  found  available.  The  most  notable 
is  the  difference  in  tone  after  the  narrative  of  the  burning  of  the 
city  by  the  Gauls.  The  sixth  book,  which  begins  the  new  era, 
starts  as  follows. 

"The  history  of  the  Romans  from  the  foundation  of  the  City  to  its  capture, 
.  .  .  has  been  set  forth  in  the  five  preceding  books.  The  subject-matter  is 
enveloped  in  obscurity ;  partly  from  its  great  antiquity,  like  remote  objects 
which  are  hardly  discernible  through  the  vastness  of  the  distance ;  partly 
owing  to  the  fact  that  written  records,  which  form  the  only  trustworthy  me- 
morials of  events,  were  in  those  times  few  and  scanty,  and  even  what  did  exist 
in  the  pontifical  commentaries  and  public  and  private  archives  nearly  all 
perished  in  the  conflagration  of  the  City.  Starting  from  the  second  beginnings 
of  the  City,  which,  like  a  plant  cut  to  its  roots,  sprang  up  in  greater  beauty  and 
fruitfulness,  the  details  of  its  history  both  civil  and  military  will  now  be  ex- 
hibited in  their  proper  order,  with  greater  clearness  and  certainty."^ 

The  promise  in  these  latter  lines  was  made  good  rather  in  a 
literary  than  in  a  scholarly  sense.  Where  all  his  authorities  agree, 
he  is  happy ;  ^  where  they  disagree  he  is  without  any  principles 
of  criticism  to  guide  him.  An  interesting  instance  of  this  is  in 
a  passage  to  which  reference  has  already  been  made.  After  stating 
that  his  readers  will  doubtless  tire  of  his  Volscians,  he  goes  on  to  say : 

"But  they  will  also  be  struck  with  the  same  difficulty  which  I  have  myself 
felt  whilst  examining  the  authorities  who  lived  nearer  to  the  period,  namely, 
from  what  source  did  the  Volscians  obtain  sufficient  soldiers  after  so  many 
defeats?  Since  this  point  has  been  passed  over  by  the  ancient  writers,  what 
can  I  do  more  than  express  an  opinion,  such  as  anyone  may  form  from  his  own 
inferences?  "  ^ 

The  point  to  be  noted  is  that  Livy  does  not  dream  of  ques- 
tioning the  fact  of  the  great  size  of  the  Volscian  army,  in  view 
of  the  agreement  of  his  authorities.  He  can  only  turn  aside  to 
theories  which  may  help  to  rationalize  the  account  so  as  to 
make  it  more  credible.  The  modern  historian  must  first  do  what 
Livy  seems  not  to  have  done  at  all,  determine  the  relation  of  his 
various  sources  one  to  the  other. 

If  Livy  was  not  a  scholarly  historian,  neither  was  he  qualified 

»  Livy,  Ab  Urbe  Condita,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  I. 

2  Ihid.,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XX ;  Bk.  VIII,  Chap.  VI ;  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  XU. 

^Ibid.,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  XII. 


LIVY  255 

by  that  experience  in  practical  affairs  which  Polybius  preferred  to 
scholarship.  His  failure  to  see  the  value  of  that  wider  knowledge 
of  men  and  places  shows  itself  not  only  in  his  lack  of  exactness 
in  geography,  to  which  reference  has  been  made,  but  it  narrows 
as  well  his  view  of  history  and  of  Rome.  As  Pelham  has  so  ably 
put  it,  "With  Polybius,  the  greatness  of  Rome  is  a  phenomenon 
to  be  critically  studied  and  scientifically  explained ;  the  rise  of 
Rome  forms  an  important  chapter  in  universal  history,  that  must 
be  dealt  with,  not  as  an  isolated  fact,  but  in  connexion  with  the 
general  march  of  events  in  the  civilized  world.  .  .  .  Livy  writes 
as  a  Roman,  to  raise  a  monument  worthy  the  greatness  of  Rome, 
and  to  keep  alive,  for  the  guidance  and  the  warning  of  Romans, 
the  recollection  alike  of  the  virtues  which  had  made  Rome  great 
and  of  the  vices  which  had  threatened  her  with  destruction."  ^ 

Livy's  history  is,  therefore,  intensely  patriotic.  Rome  was 
always  in  the  right.  Its  rise  was  due  to  the  sterling  virtues  of  the 
good  old  days ;  above  all,  to  piety.  The  fathers  of  the  Republic 
are  men  of  courage  and  firmness,  and  of  unshaken  faith  in  the  great- 
ness of  their  destiny.  Fortunately,  these  are  virtues  of  general 
application,  and  however  inadequate  they  may  be  as  an  explanation 
of  the  Roman  triumph,  they  offered  to  subsequent  moralists  much 
inspiration  to  apply  the  lessons  elsewhere.  It  is  only  in  our  own 
day  that  civic  virtues  have  ceased  to  be  impressed  upon  the  young 
by  the  model  supplied  from  the  pages  of  the  classics.  And  it  is 
sufficient  tribute  to  Livy  in  this  regard  to  recall  that  he  was  the  one 
writer  of  antiquity  singled  out  by  that  clearest  political  thinker  of 
the  humanistic  era,  Machiavelli,  to  drive  home  to  his  age  the 
lessons  of  the  past.^ 

^  H.  F.  Pelham,  article  Livy,  in  Encyclopedia  Britannica. 

'^  Vide  Discorsi  sopra  la  prima  deca  di  Tito  Livio  (various  editions,  English 
translations  1836  and  1883). 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  literature  on  Livy  is  so  well  organized  in  the  various  manuals  that  no 
detailed  bibliography  is  necessary  here.  Several  editions  of  the  text  may  be 
noted,  however.  They  are  those  of  W.  Weissenborn  and  M.  Miiller  (3  vols., 
Teubner,  1882-1885 ;  2d  ed.,  Vols.  I-II,  1901-1Q15) ;  A.  Zingerlc  (3  vols., 
1 883-1 904) ;  R.  S.  Conway  and  C.  F.  Walters  (Oxford  Library  of  Classical 


256    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Authors,  Vol.  I,  1914).  The  translation  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  is  by 
B.  O.  Foster  (13  vols.,  Vol.  I,  1919),  that  in  Everyman's  Library  is  by  W.  M. 
Roberts  (3  vols.,  1912).  Bibliographies  are  to  be  found  in  the  J ahreshericht 
ilher  die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Altertumswissenschajt,  Vol.  CXLVII 
(1910),  pp.  113  sqq.  for  1901-1909;  Sup.  Vol.  CLVI,  pp.  513  sqq.;  Vol. 
CLXXIII  (1915),  pp.  73  sq.,  pp.  210  sq.;  Vol.  CLXXVII  (1916-1918),  p.  241. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
TACITUS 

From  Livy  to  Tacitus  is  somewhat  like  passing  from  Herodotus 
to  Thucydides.  Tacitus,  too,  was  an  artist  in  history,  a  consum- 
mate artist.  His  style  is  the  result  of  the  maturity,  not  only  of 
individual,  but  also  of  national  achievement.  The  charm  of  the 
naive  is  lost.  The  story-telling  power  that  carries  one  through 
interminable  detail  by  making  narrative  entertaining  is  no  gift  of 
Tacitus.  His  appeal,  like  that  of  Thucydides,  is  to  intelligence. 
But  the  intelHgence  of  the  age  of  the  Fabians  was  not  the  same  as 
that  of  the  age  of  Pericles ;  and  beyond  the  general  standards  which 
they  set  themselves,  there  is  little  resemblance  between  the  work 
of  the  greatest  of  Greek  historians  and  that  of  the  greatest  of  the 
Latins.  For  both,  history  was  a  tribunal,  the  final  one ;  but  where 
Thucydides  was  a  magistrate,  Tacitus  was  an  advocate,  —  the  most 
brilliant,  perhaps,  who  ever  sought  to  determine  the  judgment  of 
Time,  but  an  advocate  all  the  same.  His  client  was  Rome  itself, 
and  the  stake  was  human  liberty;  but  these  impersonal  ideals 
were  less  in  evidence  in  the  handling  of  his  case  than  the  dangers 
they  encountered,  dangers  embodied  in  real  men  and  women,  not 
envisaged  as  abstractions.  It  was  the  tyrant,  not  tyranny,  that 
Tacitus  attacked ;  the  immoral  men  or  women  whom  he  could 
name,  rather  than  immorality  in  general.  But  however  powerfully 
he  drove  home  his  argument,  he  recognized  the  dignity  of  the  court 
in  which  he  was  pleading  and  asked  only  the  judgment  which  the 
facts  would  warrant.  Thus,  while  Thucydides  sought  to  establish 
the  truth  alone,  Tacitus  sought  to  maintain  that  truth  which  would 
be  of  service  to  the  world.  How  far  the  two  methods  coincided 
would  depend  upon  one's  conception  both  of  truth  and  the  prag- 
matic values  of  history. 

Of  the  life  of  Cornelius  Tacitus  we  know  very  little  ;  our  knowl- 

257 


258    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

edge  being  confined  to  what  he  tells  himself  —  and  he  is  most 
uncommunicative  —  and  to  the  letters  of  the  younger  PHny,  his 
intimate  friend,  who  addressed  no  less  than  seven  epistles  to  him.^ 
The  date  of  his  birth  has  been  fixed,  by  a  surmise  as  to  his  probable 
age  upon  appointment  to  political  office,  at  about  54  a.d.  ;  and  he 
must  have  lived  through  approximately  the  first  two  decades  of 
the  next  century.  The  marked  stages  of  his  political  career  are 
indicated  by  him  in  somewhat  enigmatic  fashion  at  the  opening  of 
his  Histories:  "My  political  position  was  begun  by  Vespasian, 
augmented  by  Titus  and  carried  still  higher  by  Domitian."  ^  This 
has  been  taken  to  mean  that  Vespasian  made  him  quaestor;  that 
he  became  aedile  or  tribune  of  the  people  under  Titus  and  praetor 
under  Domitian.^  His  marriage  with  the  daughter  of  Agricola 
calls  out  a  passing  comment,"*  but,  although  he  immortalized  his 
wife's  father,  he  is  practically  silent  about  his  home  Hfe.  He  in- 
dicates that  he  left  Rome  for  four  years  upon  the  completion  of 
his  praetorship^  but  nowhere  does  he  indicate  where  he  spent  this 
time.  Conjecture  naturally  connects  it  with  his  famous  monograph 
on  Germany,  although  it  did  not  appear  until  some  six  years  later 
(98  A.D.) ;  and  still  further  surmise,  hunting  for  a  suitable  post 
for  observation,  would  give  him  the  governorship  of  Belgic  Gaul.^ 
However  this  may  be,  he  was  back  in  Rome  in  93  a.d.,  and  there  is 
ample  evidence  in  his  Histories  that  from  then  till  the  close  of  Domi- 
tian's  reign,  he  Hved  through  the  very  heart  of  "the  terror."  ^ 
He  was  consul  the  year  after  the  tyrant's  death ;  and  then  began 
to  publish  his  shorter  studies,  the  Life  of  Agricola  in  97  or  98,  and 
the  Germania  in  98.  His  histories,  the  works  of  years  of  study, 
favored  by  the  quiet  resulting  from  his  forced  dissimulation  under 
the  tyranny  of  Domitian,  were  published  piecemeal,  as  he  completed 

1  Pliny's  letters  are  a  valuable  source  for  the  society  of  the  day  of  Tacitus.  There 
is  a  good  translation  based  upon  the  Teubner  text,  by  J.  B.  Firth  {The  Letters  of  the 
Younger  Pliny,  2  vols.,  1909-1910). 

-  Tacitus,  Hisloriae,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I. 

'  This  conjecture  has  been  accepted  by  G.  Boissier,  Tacitus  and  Other  Roman 
Studies  (translated  by  W.  G.  Hutchinson,  1906),  p.  26.  CJ.  discussion  by  Teuffel- 
Schwabe,  op.  cit.,  Vol.  II,  Sect,  sss,  n.  6. 

*  Tacitus,  Agricola,  Chap.  IX. 

^  Tacitus,  Annales,  Bk.  XI,  Chap.  XI,  and  Agricola,  Chap.  XLV. 

^  Cf.  G.  Boissier,  op.  cit.,  p.  28. 

^  Tacitus,  Agricola,  Chaps.  Ill,  XLV. 


TACITUS  259 

them.  Boissier  has  inferred  from  a  letter  of  Pliny  that  the  Histories 
probably  began  to  appear  about  105  a.d.,  and  that  it  was  because 
they  had  taken  Rome  by  storm  that  Pliny  suffered  a  sudden  and 
sore  temptation  to  try  his  own  hand  at  history  as  a  means  of  achiev- 
ing immortaUty.^  A  chance  remark  in  the  Annals,  that  the  Roman 
Empire  "now  extends  to  the  Red  Sea"^  through  Egypt,  implies 
that  these  words  were  written  about  ten  years  later  (c.  115  a.d.), 
when  Trajan  had  carried  the  frontiers  this  far.  Finally,  an  in- 
scription discovered  in  modern  times  in  Caria  indicates  that  toward 
the  end  of  Trajan's  reign,  Tacitus  held  the  great  post  of  proconsul 
in  Asia.'^ 

Such  is  the  meagre  framework  for  the  hfe  of  Tacitus,  except 
for  the  indications  furnished  in  the  letters  of  Pliny,  which  are  less 
separate  facts  than  a  picture  of  the  society  in  which  they  moved 
and  of  the  interests  of  the  two  men.  Pliny  tells  us  that  when  he 
began  his  career  at  the  Roman  bar,  Tacitus  was  "already  in  the 
prime  of  his  glory  and  renown"  ^  as  a  celebrated  pleader;  and  he 
still  practised  pleading  after  Domitian's  death,  for  we  know  of  one 
important  law-suit  which  he  conducted  jointly  with  Pliny.  But 
the  eloquence  to  which  Pliny  bears  generous  witness  ^  awakened 
even  less  admiration  than  the  histories.  These,  he  asserts,  will  live 
forever ;  and  fortunate  is  the  man  who  can  secure  mention  in  their 
enduring  pages. ^  Reading  Pliny,  one  might  suppose  that  Tacitus 
belonged  to  those  whom  contemporaries  already  have  marked  out  for 
immortahty.  But  if  so,  they  were  content  to  let  him  achieve  it 
by  his  own  works,  unaided  by  biographers. 

So  much  for  the  outlines  of  Tacitus'  life.  But  if  the  external 
facts  are  lacking,  the  more  intimate  picture  of  his  education  and 
outlook,  of  the  society  he  frequented  and  of  the  influences  upon 
him  of  its  morals,  manners  and  politics,  is  relatively  clear.  He  was 
an  aristocrat,  not  of  the  old  nobility  of  Rome,  for  they  had  almost 
all  disappeared  ;  but  of  the  newer  gentry,  drawn  from  the  provinces 

1  Plinius  Secundus,  Epistulae,  Bk.  V,  Letter  8.     Cf.  G.  Boissier,  op.  cit.,  p.  93. 

^  Tacitus,  Annales,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  LXI. 

^  Cf.  Bulletin  de  cones pondance  hcllenique,  Vol.  XIV  (1890),  pp.  621-623. 

*  Plinius  Secundus,  Epistulae,  Bk.  VIII,  Letter  20. 

*  Ibid.,  Bk.  II,  Letter  i.    Tacitus  is  "the  most  eloquent  man  in  Rome." 
«  Ibid.,  Bk.  VI,  Letter  16;  Bk.  VII,  Letter  ZS- 


26o    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

or  from  the  official  classes.^  It  was  a  wealthy  and  polite  society, 
like  that  of  the  old  regime  in  France ;  one  where  wits  counted, 
where  literature  was  a  passport  to  elegant  salons  and  clever  repartee 
might  make,  or  unmake,  fortunes.  It  was  more  a  school  for  scandal 
than  for  history.  There  was  much  floating  gossip  which  Tacitus, 
as  a  man  of  the  world,  could  hardly  fail  to  pick  up ;  mostly  mali- 
cious gossip,  concerned  with  personalities  rather  than  with  political 
movements,  spiteful  guesses  as  to  what  was  going  on  by  those  who 
wished  to  pose  as  knowing,  and  who  felt  aggrieved  that  they  did 
not,  or  generally  depreciating  comments  by  the  politically  unem- 
ployed. The  only  thing  to  recommend  this  unlovely  growth  of 
scandal-mongering  was  its  contrast  with  the  still  more  unlovely 
output  of  adulation  on  the  other  side.  Fortunately  such  a  school 
brings  its  own  remedy  in  the  sophisticated  skepticism  which  it 
breeds  in  those  who  indulge  in  its  sensational  curriculum,  so  that 
its  worst  effects  are  attenuated.  But  the  skepticism  it  breeds  is 
not  of  that  inquiring  kind  which  leads  to  science;  it  is  more  the 
dulling  influence  of  surfeited  sensationalism,  tending  to  bring  indif- 
ference. It  is  not  a  happy  soil  for  scientific  history.  In  a  mind 
like  that  of  Tacitus  it  bred  a  sort  of  saturnine  melancholy  which 
pervades  all  his  work. 

Tacitus  himself  belonged  by  sentiment  to  the  senatorial  faction, 
although  in  practice  accepting  office  and  favor  from  the  emperor. 
His  prejudices  are  not  concealed,  the  only  point  in  doubt  is  how 
far  his  sense  of  scientific  obligation  to  historical  truth  kept  him 
within  the  restraints  of  accuracy .^  It  is  a  problem  which  will 
probably  never  be  solved,  for  we  have  little  but  Tacitus  himself 
upon  which  to  base  our  judgment.  Moreover,  it  is  the  one  subject 
upon  which  the  commentators  upon  Tacitus  have  almost  invariably 
concentrated  their  remarks.     Hence  we  shall  not  delay  here  over 

1  The  elder  Pliny  in  his  Natural  History,  Bk.  VII,  Chap.  XVII,  refers  to  a  Cornelius 
Tacitus,  a  Roman  knight,  who  was  a  financial  administrator  in  Belgic  Gaul.  It  has 
been  conjectured  that  he  was  either  father  or  uncle  to  the  historian.  Cf.  G.  Boissier, 
op.  cit.,  p.  2. 

^  Tacitus'  feeling  for  his  class  comes  out  on  all  occasions.  He  upholds  its  dig- 
nity even  against  itself.  For  instance,  when  some  nobles  so  far  forgot  themselves  as 
to  go  into  the  imperial  Neronian  vaudeville,  to  retrieve  their  fortunes,  he  turns  the  in- 
cident against  the  emperor,  who  would  bring  such  disgrace  upon  the  victims.  As  for 
themselves  he  comments,  "As  they  have  ended  their  days,  I  think  it  due  to  their  an- 
cestors not  to  hand  down  their  names."     The  Annals,  Bk.  XIV,  Chap.  XIV. 


TACITUS  261 

it,  or  such  related  questions  as  that  of  the  real  character  of  Tiberius ; 
whether  the  Germania  was  mainly  a  moral  lesson  to  the  Romans, 
or  other  well-worn  themes  of  criticism.  The  mere  fact  that  such 
questions  do  persist  in  offering  themselves  to  readers  of  Tacitus  is 
itself  an  indication  of  the  character  of  his  work  as  a  whole. 

The  social  prejudices  of  Tacitus  were  responsible  for  more  than 
his  partiality;  they  also  account  for  the  details  as  to  the  fate  of 
prominent  citizens,  with  which  he  clogs  his  narrative  of  imperial 
history.  No  one  now  cares  much  about  these  ill-starred  victims 
or  unwise  plotters.  But  the  audience  for  which  Tacitus  wrote 
had  a  personal  interest  as  keen  as  his  own  in  the  interminable  stories 
of  intrigue.  These  were  something  like  family  tales  of  one's  ances- 
tors, cherished  in  a  smothered  desire  for  either  justification  or 
posthumous  vengeance.  Tacitus  found  it  hard  to  make  up  his 
mind  to  omit  any  of  these  crimes,  and  the  result  was  to  give  to  much 
of  his  narrative  something  of  that  savage  flavor  which  seems  most 
appropriate  in  a  Gregory  of  Tours.  One  might  almost  fancy, 
reading  such  a  "long  succession  of  horrors,"  ^  that  the  scene  was  at 
a  Merovingian,  semi-civiHzed  court,  or  among  Nibelungen  heroes, 
instead  of  the  court  and  capital  of  all  the  world.  It  is  rather  too 
much  to  be  convincing ;  for  however  true  the  facts  might  be,  they 
could  hardly  be  the  central  theme  of  history. 

Tacitus  was  aware  that  all  was  not  right  with  such  a  narrative, 
but  could  not  discover  the  remedy.  He  was  too  close  to  the  scene 
for  that,  too  much  involved  in  the  petty  issues  of  family  politics. 
He  knew  that  the  stage  was  overcrowded  and  the  action  a  long- 
drawn-out  succession  of  intrigues  or  atrocities,  and  from  time  to 
time  commented  on  his  embarrassment  in  being  obliged  to  repeat 
continually  such  stories  as  these.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  since 
the  events  had  happened,  and  since  in  his  eyes  they  had  formed  the 
chief  content  of  imperial  history,  he  felt  that  his  obhgation  to  his- 
toric accuracy  and  fulness  prevented  curtailment.  As  a  historian 
he  was  happy  to  gather  all  the  facts  he  could,  however  difficult  it 
made  the  literary  task  of  exposition.  This  comes  out  in  such  com- 
ments as  the  following : 

"Many  authors,  I  am  well  aware,  have  passed  over  the  perils 
and  punishments  of  a  host  of  persons,  sickened  by  the  multiplicity 
1  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XXXI. 


262    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

of  them,  or  fearing  that  what  they  had  themselves  found  wearisome 
and  saddening,  would  be  equally  fatiguing  to  their  readers.  For 
myself,  I  have  lighted  on  many  facts  worth  knowing,  though  other 
writers  have  not  recorded  them."  ^ 

But  if  a  sense  of  scholarship  tempted  him  to  tell  the  whole  story, 
how  could  he  retain  the  interest  of  his  reader?  It  was  Livy's 
question  over  again.  And  Tacitus,  mindful  of  how  well  Livy  had 
maintained  that  interest  by  digressions  and  incidental  matter 
thrown  into  the  serious  current  of  his  work,  tried  the  same  devices.^ 
The  narrative  of  what  was  happening  in  the  city  was  varied  by  con- 
stant reference  to  events  in  the  frontiers  or  in  the  provinces.  These 
glimpses  of  the  wider  current  of  imperial  affairs  in  the  eyes  of  the 
modern  historian  give  the  meaning  to  the  whole ;  ^  to  Tacitus  they 
rather  gave  relief  from  the  oppressive  quality  of  his  chief  subject, 
the  fate  of  men  of  his  class.  For  instance,  after  an  account  of  one 
of  the  Parthian  wars  he  adds  :  "I  have  related  in  sequence  the  events 
of  two  summer  campaigns  as  a  relief  to  the  reader's  mind  from  our 
miseries  at  home."  "*  This  is  hardly  the  way  to  conceive  history 
greatly. 

Tacitus  himself  recognized  the  shortcomings  of  his  work  in  this 
regard,  without  ever  quite  learning  how  to  overcome  them.  He 
fancied  that  the  trouble  lay  in  the  subject  itself,  which  is  but  another 
way  of  saying  that  the  subject  was  too  great  for  him.     This  comes 

1  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  VII  (A.  J.  Church  and  W.  J.  Brodribb's 
translation) .  If  they  were  not  recorded,  they  must  have  been  repeated  by  word  of  mouth. 
In  any  case  such  a  reference  shows  what  vague  traces  we  have  as  to  the  sources  of  Tacitus. 

2  Not  merely  to  entertain,  however.  As  he  states  himself,  "he  wiU  studiously 
refrain  from  embroidering  his  narrative  with  tales  of  fabulous  marvels,  and  from  di- 
verting his  readers  with  fictions ;  that  would  be  unbecoming  the  dignity  of  the  work  he 
has  undertaken."  Histories,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  L.  Cf.  G.  Boissier,  o/».  cit.,  p.  75;  H.  Fur- 
neaux,  The  Annals  of  Tacitus  (2  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1896-1907),  Vol.  I,  pp.  40-41. 

3  The  best  illustration  is  of  course  Mommsen. 

4  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  XXXVII.  The  remark  is  all  the  more 
significant  since  the  chapter  on  the  phcenLx  having  been  seen  again  in  Egypt  occurs 
just  before  the  account  of  the  Parthian  campaigns.  One  might  have  thought  it  was 
sufficient  diversion ! 

But  even  foreign  wars  became  monotonous  in  time.  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  XVI,  Chap.  XVI. 
"Even  if  I  had  to  relate  foreign  wars  and  deaths  encountered  in  the  service  of  the 
State  with  such  a  monotony  of  disaster,  I  should  myself  have  been  overcome  by  dis- 
gust, while  I  should  look  for  weariness  in  my  readers,  sickened  as  they  would  be  by  the 
melancholy  and  continuous  destruction  of  our  citizens,  however  glorious  to  them- 
selves."   This  is  surely  personal  history,  lacking  in  perception  of  larger  issues. 


TACITUS  263 

out  in  a  remarkable  passage  in  which  he  frankly  compares  his  task 
with  that  of  Livy,  although  avoiding  mention  of  his  predecessor's 
name: 

"Much  of  what  I  have  related  and  shall  have  to  relate,  may  perhaps, 
I  am  aware,  seem  petty  trifles  to  record.  But  no  one  must  compare  my  annals 
with  the  writings  of  those  who  have  described  Rome  in  old  days.  They  told 
of  great  wars,  of  the  storming  of  cities,  of  the  defeat  and  capture  of  kings,  or 
whenever  they  turned  by  preference  to  home  affairs,  they  related,  with  a  free 
scope  for  digression,  the  strifes  of  consuls  with  tribunes,  land  and  corn-laws, 
and  the  struggles  between  the  commons  and  the  aristocracy.  My  labours  are 
circumscribed  and  inglorious ;  peace  wholly  unbroken  or  but  shghtly  disturbed, 
dismal  misery  in  the  capital,  an  emperor  careless  about  the  enlargement  of  the 
empire,  such  is  my  theme.  Still  it  will  not  be  useless  to  study  those  at  first 
sight  trifling  events  out  of  which  the  movements  of  vast  changes  often  take 
their  rise. 

"All  nations  and  cities  are  ruled  by  the  people,  the  nobility,  or  by  one  man. 
A  constitution  formed  by  selection  out  of  these  elements,  it  is  easy  to  commend 
but  not  to  produce ;  or,  if  it  is  produced,  it  cannot  be  lasting.  Formerly,  when 
the  people  had  power  or  when  the  patricians  were  in  the  ascendant,  the  popular 
temper  and  the  m_ethods  of  controlling  it,  had  to  be  studied,  and  those  who 
knew  most  accurately  the  spirit  of  the  Senate  and  aristocracy,  had  the  credit 
of  understanding  the  age  and  of  being  wise  men.  So  now,  after  a  revolution, 
when  Rome  is  nothing  but  the  realm  of  a  single  despot,  there  must  be  good  in 
carefully  noting  this  period,  for  it  is  but  few  who  have  the  foresight  to  dis- 
tinguish right  from  wrong  or  what  is  sound  from  what  is  hurtful,  while  most 
men  learn  wisdom  from  the  fortunes  of  others.  Still,  though  this  is  instructive, 
it  gives  very  little  pleasure.  Descriptions  of  countries,  the  various  incidents 
of  battles,  glorious  deaths  of  great  generals,  enchain  and  refresh  a  reader's 
mind.  I  have  to  present  in  succession  the  merciless  biddings  of  a  tyrant, 
incessant  prosecutions,  faithless  friendships,  the  ruin  of  innocence,  the  same 
causes  issuing  in  the  same  results,  and  I  am  everywhere  confronted  by  a  weari- 
some monotony  in  my  subject  matter.  Then,  again,  an  ancient  historian  has 
but  few  disparagers,  and  no  one  cares  whether  you  praise  more  heartily  the 
armies  of  Carthage  or  Rome.  But  of  many  who  endured  punishment  or  dis- 
grace under  Tiberius  the  descendants  yet  survive  ;  or  even  though  the  families 
themselves  may  now  be  extinct,  you  will  find  those  who,  from  a  resemblance  of 
character,  imagine  that  the  evil  deeds  of  others  are  a  reproach  to  themselves. 
Again,  even  honour  and  virtue  make  enemies,  condemning,  as  they  do,  their 
opposites  by  too  close  a  contrast.     But  I  return  to  my  work."  > 

In  so  many  words  Tacitus  puts  his  case ;  and,  as  a  skilled  pleader, 
he  puts  it  well.     But  a  little  examination  of  the  extract  shows  how. 

1  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  IV,  Chaps.  XXXII,  XXXIII. 


264    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

in  reality,  he  simply  gives  his  case  away.  "Peace  wholly  unbroken 
or  but  slightly  disturbed,  dismay  in  the  capital,  an  emperor  care- 
less about  the  enlargement  of  the  empire,  such  is  my  theme."  Its 
history  is  bound  to  be  "circumscribed  and  inglorious."  These 
words,  however,  indicate  not  its  limitations  as  he  imagines,  but  his 
own.  For  just  as  Thucydides  failed  to  leave  us  the  history  of  the 
greatest  theme  of  Greece,  Athens  at  the  height  of  its  glory,  so 
Tacitus  failed  adequately  to  describe  that  greatest  political  creation 
of  antiquity,  which  for  the  first  time  in  history  was  extending  a 
common  citizenship  throughout  the  world,  building  up  a  common 
law  and  policing  the  routes  of  commerce  for  the  arts  of  peace.  It 
was,  again,  the  failure  of  the  pre-scientific  mind  to  appreciate  the 
importance  of  the  commonplace  and  obscure,  —  which  is  the  major 
theme  of  Hfe  and  society.^  There  is,  however,  this  difference  be- 
tween Thucydides  and  Tacitus,  that  the  former  had  personally  a 
keen  appreciation  of  the  Athens  he  took  for  granted ;  while  Tacitus, 
in  spite  of  all  his  insight,  seems  hardly  to  have  seen  the  Roman 
Empire.  He  saw  and  traced  its  external  fortunes ;  and  his  vivid 
picture  of  details,  on  distant  frontiers  as  well  as  at  home,  lend  to 
his  work  that  appearance  of  reahty  to  which  the  modern  journahst 
aspires.  But  the  deeper  facts  of  statesmanship  escaped  him,  the 
living  forces  of  a  busy  world  intent  upon  the  security  of  its  heritage, 
a  world  that  was  something  more  than  a  victim  of  intrigue.  Grant- 
ing that  he  could  not  analyze  in  terms  of  sciences  yet  undiscovered, 
he  might  at  least  have  brought  to  the  problem  more  of  that  an- 
tique substitute  for  science,  the  open  mind.  He  had  seen  too  much 
of  hfe  to  be  capable  of  its  greatest  gift,  —  the  sense  of  wonder,  which, 
as  Plato  said,  is  the  beginning  of  philosophy.'^ 

The  more  one  examines  the  Histories  and  Annals  the  more  one 
feels  that  such  an  adverse  judgment  is  justified.  Compare  the  out- 
look of  Tacitus  upon  the  problems  of  his  day  with  those  of  even 
the  most  mediocre  modern  historian  of  the  imperial  history,  and 
one  sees  at  once  what  was  lacking  in  the  work  of  the  Roman.  But 
again,  on  the  other  hand,  as  we  have  so  often  insisted  in  the  course 
of  these  studies,  the  conclusion  does  not  follow  that  Tacitus'  failure 

*  On  Tacitus'  avoidance  of  trivialities  see  especially  the  analysis  of  H.  Peter,  Die 
geschicktliche  Litteratur  .  .  .,  Vol.  II,  p.  45.    But  this  is  a  different  matter. 
^  Thccetetus,  155  D. 


TACITUS  265 

to  grasp  the  essentials  of  his  age  is  to  be  judged  in  the  hght  of  our 
knowledge.  If  he  failed  to  rise  to  the  full  height  of  the  real  theme 
of  his  age,  it  was  partly  because  history  had  not  yet  learned  to  deal 
with  generalized  and  abstract  forces.  It  dealt  with  men  instead ; 
with  nations  as  aggregations  of  individuals,  where  character  and 
chance  are  at  grips  with  destiny;  with  policies  determined  by 
personalities,  incidents  settled  by  single  appeals  or  by  acts  of  force. 
There  are  passing  references  here  and  there  in  Tacitus  to  the  busi- 
ness side  of  politics,  but  they  are  generally  incidental.  The  most 
notable  exception  is  the  description  of  ''The  Panic  of  the  Year  33,"  ^ 
as  it  has  been  aptly  termed  by  a  modern  writer.  This  was  too 
serious  a  social  crisis  to  be  ignored.  Moreover,  it  affected  many 
private  fortunes.  There  are  as  well  references  to  the  dangers  of 
excessive  luxury  in  Rome,  as  in  the  case  when  Tiberius  addressed  a 
letter  to  the  Senate  on  the  subject.^  But,  upon  the  whole,  questions 
of  economics  are  as  few  and  far  between  as  those  of  general  politics.^ 
As  for  the  process  of  social  evolution,  Tacitus  is  almost  naively 
conservative.  In  a  society  so  advanced  as  that  in  which  he  lived 
it  almost  required  a  certain  wilful  ignorance  of  history  to  insist, 
as  Tacitus  does,  that :  "Mankind  in  the  earliest  age  lived  for  a  time 
without  a  single  vicious  impulse,  without  punishment  and  restraints. 
Rewards  were  not  needed  when  everything  right  was  pursued 
on  its  own  merits ;  and  as  men  desired  nothing  against  morahty, 
they  were  debarred  from  nothing  by  fear.  When  however  they 
began  to  throw  off  equality,  and  ambition  and  violence  usurped 
the  place  of  self-control  and  modesty,  despotisms  grew  up  and 
became  perpetual  among  many  nations."^  "Man  is  born  free; 
and  everywhere  he  is  in  chains  "  was  the  way  Rousseau  put  it, 
in  the  ringing  challenge  of  the  opening  words  of  the  Social  Con- 
tract.    Tacitus,  too,  was  writing  an  indictment  of  society ;  but  a 

1  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  VI,  Chaps.  XVI,  XVII.  Cf.  W.  Stearns  Davis, 
The  Influence  of  Wealth  in  Imperial  Rome  (1910),  a  stimulating  book  for  careful  readers. 

2  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  Ill,  Chaps.  LII-LV. 

'  There  is  the  repetition  of  old  complaints  about  the  decline  of  Italian  farm  supplies 
{ibid.,  Bk.  XII,  Chap.  XLIII) ;  similarly  rather  dubious  comments  on  Nero's  proposed 
reforms  in  taxation  {ibid.,  Bk.  XIII,  Chap.  LI),  with  sometimes  an  interest  in  the 
supply  of  metal,  as  in  the  silver  mines  at  Nassau  {ibid.,  Bk.  XI,  Chap.  XX).  See,  also, 
references  to  Nero's  spell  of  economy,  Bk.  XV,  Chap.  XVIII,  or  his  extravagance, 
Bk.  XVI,  Chap.  III. 

^  Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  XXVI. 


266    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

misreading  of  history  excusable  in  a  prophet  is  less  easy  to  pardon 
in  a  historian. 

Tacitus  at  least  had  not  much  of  a  generalized  conception  of 
historical  processes.  And  that  is  why  he  did  not  know  how  to  manip- 
ulate the  vast  and  often  obscure  interrelation  of  events  so  as  to 
show  its  larger  meaning.  It  is  perhaps  too  much  to  say  that  he 
never  saw  his  history  as  a  whole ;  but  he  never  saw  it  in  the  whole 
of  its  setting.  He  was  a  great  artist  rather  than  a  great  thinker, 
a  wonderful  obseryer  and  analyst  of  motives;  but  fundamentally 
a  master  of  detail.  In  efTect  his  depiction  reminds  one  of  the  old 
Dutch  masters;  of  features  drawn  with  minutest  care  yet  deftly 
and  swiftly;  of  landscapes  enriched  with  everything  really  there. 
What  makes  his  greatness  as  an  artist  is  that  he  combines  this 
mastery  of  detail  with  a  freedom  and  breadth  of  movement,  a  grave 
and  sombre  power  which  gives  to  his  work  the  high  quality  of 
tragedy.  It  always  speaks  with  dignity,  however  trivial  the  in- 
cident. It  never  rings  false,  no  matter  how  strained  and  rhetorical 
the  phrase.  Sentences  are  compressed  into  phrases  and  phrases 
into  single  words ;  but  the  crabbed  text  challenges  the  reader  — 
and  remains  with  him. 

Yet,  in  spite  of  all  this  richness  of  detail,  power  of  depiction, 
mastery  of  expression  and  dignity  of  spirit,  Tacitus  remained  an 
annalist,  whose  narrative  was  held  together  by  that  most  primitive 
of  all  links,  the  time  nexus.  Things  are  mentioned  when  they 
happened,  because  they  happened  when  they  did.  There  is  no 
such  attempt  to  trace  the  complex  of  events  through  cause  and 
effect  as  we  find  in  the  Greeks.  To  be  sure  there  are  common-sense 
remarks  as  to  why  this  or  that  incident  arose,  but  the  wider  sweep 
of  history,  which  gives  it  its  meaning,  is  lacking.^  Year  by  year, 
or  event  by  event,  the  facts  are  noted  as  they  occur  in  the  sources, 
and  the  items  jotted  down  are  mostly  quite  isolated  from  those 

1  This  general  comment  stands  in  spite  of  various  passages  which  might  be  cited 
against  it,  as,  for  instance,  the  closing  words  of  the  second  book  of  the  Annals,  with 
reference  to  Arminius :  "He  is  still  a  theme  of  song  among  barbarian  nations,  though 
to  Greek  historians,  who  admire  only  their  own  achievements,  he  is  unknown,  and  to 
Romans  not  as  famous  as  he  should  be,  while  we  extol  the  past  and  are  indifferent  to 
our  own  times"  {ibid.,  Bk.  II,  Chap.  LXXXVIII).  But  if  Tacitus  had  been  working 
in  the  spirit  of  Herodotus,  the  Germania  would  have  been  incorporated  in  the  history 
as  one  of  the  logoi. 


TACITUS  267 

which  precede  or  follow.  Only  the  extent  of  detail  on  each  one  pre- 
vents the  almost  mediaeval  quality  of  such  a  plan  from  appearing 
at  first  glance.  That  it  does  not  do  so  is  due  to  the  skill  with  which 
the  author  used  his  artistry  of  expression  to  cover  the  defects  of 
his  plan. 

It  is  typical  of  such  a  historian  that  his  best  work  should  be, 
in  addition  to  the  depiction  of  character,  —  as  in  the  marvellous 
portrayal  of  Tiberius,  —  the  description  of  great  crises,  when  events 
so  concentrate  in  a  single  time  or  place  as  not  to  involve  a  problem 
in  perspective.  Of  these,  the  most  outstanding  instance  is  the 
opening  portion  of  the  Histories,  where  the  revolutionary  year  69 
is  described  in  such  graphic  detail,  that,  as  the  translator  of  the 
text  has  put  it,  we  know  no  other  year  in  all  antique  history  as  we 
do  this.  In  the  rapid  passage  of  events,  the  play  and  counterplay 
of  emotion,  the  sudden  changes  of  fortune,  mob  action  uncertain 
yet  determining  the  wavering  of  its  leaders,  soldiery  in  control  but 
not  sure  of  itself,  and  the  empire  the  prize  of  disorder,  we  have  a 
scene  painted  with  masterful  power  and  scrupulous  care.  It  is 
Tacitus  at  his  best. 

When  we  turn  from  the  choice  and  handling  of  the  subject  to 
the  more  technical  problem  of  the  use  of  sources,  we  find  Tacitus 
about  as  much  at  sea  as  in  the  shaping  of  his  general  plan.  In  the 
first  place  there  is  the  question  of  oral  tradition  and  rumor.^  How 
can  it  be  tested?  What  criteria  are  there  for  the  contemporary 
historian,  by  which  to  substantiate  what  he  hears?  Time  and  again 
he  comes  from  this  problem.  For  instance,  he  tells  us  that  the 
measures  taken  to  avenge  the  death  of  Germanicus  were  "a  subject 
of  conflicting  rumors,  not  only  among  the  people  then  living  but 
also  in  after  times.  So  obscure  are  the  greatest  events,  as  some 
take  for  granted  any  hearsay,  whatever  its  source,  others  turn 
truth  into  falsehood,  and  both  errors  find  encouragement  with 
posterity."  ^  More  flat-footed  still  is  the  attack  upon  such  unsup- 
ported rumor  as  had  fastened  the  crime  of  Drusus'  murder  upon 
Tiberius.  After  giving  the  story  of  that  crime  as  he  finds  it  in  the 
narratives  of  most  of  the  best  historians,  in  which  Tiberius  is  not 

1  "Rome  with  its  love  of  talking."     (Tacitus,   The  Annals,  Bk.  XIII,  Chap.  VI.) 
*  Ihid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  XIX. 


268     INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

implicated,  he  relates  at  length  the  accusing  rumor  to  disprove  it, 
adding : 

"My  object  in  mentioning  and  refuting  this  story,  is,  by  a  conspicuous 
example,  to  put  down  hearsay,  and  to  request  all  into  whose  hands  my  work 
shall  come,  not  to  catch  eagerly  at  wild  and  improbable  rumors  in  preference 
to  genuine  history  which  has  not  yet  been  perverted  into  romance."  ^ 

This  seems  clear  and  straightforward;  but  current  history 
simply  cannot  ignore  current  gossip,  and  Tacitus'  histories  are 
constantly  fed  by  its  sediment-bearing  stream.  Indeed,  as  the 
written  sources  he  consulted  were  themselves  often  but  the  com- 
posite result  of  similar  rumors,  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  if  such 
phrases  as  "it  was  said"  or  "many  say"  run  through  the  narrative 
as  substantiating  references.  Sometimes  he  definitely  admits 
the  importance  of  such  source  material,  as  in  connection  with  the 
description  of  Piso's  death  at  Tiberius'  instigation : 

"I  remember  to  have  heard  old  men  say  that  a  document  was  often  seen 
in  Piso's  hands  the  substance  of  which  he  never  divulged,  but  which  his  friends 
repeatedly  declared  contained  a  letter  from  Tiberius  with  instructions  referring 
to  Germanicus,  and  that  it  was  his  intention  to  produce  it  before  the  Senate 
and  upbraid  the  emperor,  had  he  not  been  deluded  by  vain  promises  from 
Sejanus.  Nor  did  he  perish,  they  said,  by  his  own  hand,  but  by  that  of  one 
sent  to  be  his  executioner. 

"Neither  of  these  statements  would  I  positively  affirm;  still  it  would  not 
be  right  for  us  to  conceal  what  was  related  by  those  who  lived  up  to  the  time 
of  my  youth."  ^ 

In  short,  it  was  inevitable  that  much  of  Tacitus'  work  would 
have  to  depend  upon  oral  testimony.  How  much  this  was  the  case 
is  impossible  to  state  definitely,  for  except  in  the  matter  of  ofi&cial 
documents  and  when  his  sources  disagree  and  he  must  choose  be- 
tween them,  he  does  not  mention  them  individually.^  However, 
it  should  be  recalled  that  he  himself  had  been  contemporary  with 

»  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XI. 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  XVI. 

3  Even  this  is  greatly  to  his  credit.  Boissier,  commenting  on  it,  says  {pp.  cit.,  p.  55) : 
"He  is  the  ancient  historian  who  most  frequently  cites  the  authors  and  documents  he 
has  consulted.  He  does  not  do  so  out  of  a  kind  of  erudition  run  mad,  as  is  so  often 
done  nowadays  to  make  a  show  of  being  better  informed  than  other  people,  since  .  .  . 
no  one  then  deemed  it  any  merit  in  an  author,  and  since  consequently  he  could  reap  no 
glory  therefrom." 


TACITUS  269 

most  of  his  narratives,  for  he  was  about  fourteen  years  old  when 
Nero  died,  and  as  a  boy  he  must  have  heard  many  a  reminiscence  of 
the  days  of  Tiberius  and  events  of  Augustus.  The  influence  of  these 
experiences  upon  his  histories  must  extend  far  beyond  single  in- 
cidents which  might  be  attributed  to  this  or  that  source ;  they 
would  largely  determine  his  whole  outlook. 

As  to  written  sources,  Tacitus  falls  back  upon  the  well-accepted 
principles  which  we  have  seen  followed  by  his  predecessors,  es- 
pecially Livy.  Where  his  sources  agree,  he  accepts  the  narrative  — 
unless  denied  by  more  authoritative  personal  or  oral  accounts. 
"Proposing  as  I  do  (he  says),  to  follow  the  consentient  testimony 
of  historians,  I  shall  give  the  difference  in  their  narratives  under 
the  writers'  names."  ^  But  he  does  not  follow  these  sources  blindly. 
He  checks  one  by  another,  and  does  not  always  adhere  to  the  same 
one  in  different  parts  of  his  works.^  When  there  is  Httle  to  choose 
between  contradictory  sources  he  is  plainly  at  a  loss.  For  instance, 
take  a  comment  like  this : 

"I  can  hardly  venture  on  any  positive  statement  about  the  consular  elec- 
tions, now  held  for  the  first  time  under  this  emperor,  or  indeed  subsequently, 
so  conflicting  are  the  accounts  we  find  not  only  in  the  historians  but  in  Tiberius' 
own  speeches."  ^ 

This  extract  is  interesting  as  indicating  Tacitus'  constant  use 
of  documentary  material,  as  well  as  narrative.  He  consulted  the 
fund  of  information  in  the  Daily  Register,'^  and  memoirs  of  notable 
characters.^  The  problem  in  criticism,  however,  as  to  what  he 
most  relied  upon,  whether  he  simply  rewrote  some  of  the  more 
excellent  historical  accounts  before  his  day,  or  completely  remade 
the  story,  will  hardly  ever  be  settled,  since  the  authorities  he  used 
have  practically  all  perished.^  It  is  abundantly  clear,  however, 
that  he  spared  no  pains  to  get  at  the  truth;  and  that,  lacking  a 

1  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  XIIT,  Chap.  XX. 

-  Cf.  H.  Furneaux,  The  Annals  of  Tacitus,  Vol.  I,  p.  26. 

3  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  LXXXI. 

■*  E.g.  ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  III.  On  this  see  the  chapter  by  Boissier,  op.  cit., 
pp.  197  sqq. 

5  Cf.  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  LIII. 

^  All  studies  of  Tacitus'  use  of  source  material  are  much  in  debt  to  the  various 
works  of  Philippe  Fabia,  especially  Les  sources  de  Tacite  dans  les  hisloires  et  les  annales 
(1893).     Vide  infra,  Bibliographical  Note. 


270    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

knowledge  of  the  principles  of  source-criticism  which  leads  the  mod- 
ern scholar  to  trace  the  history  of  his  documents  before  he  risks  the 
story  of  the  events  they  record,  he  nevertheless  made  up  by  genius 
for  the  shortcomings  of  science,  in  so  far  as  that  could  well  be 
done. 

That  with  all  his  handicap  Tacitus  takes  rank  still  in  the  fore- 
front of  the  world's  historians  is  due  not  only  to  his  genius  as  a 
word  painter,  or  his  insight  into  character,  —  the  two  gifts  in  which 
he  excels,  —  but  also  to  his  idea  of  history  itself.  He  has  a  most 
exalted  conception  of  it.  There  is  small  tolerance  for  the  dilettante 
outlook  of  those  "elderly  men  who  amuse  themselves  comparing 
present  and  past."  ^  He  holds,  in  common  with  all  earnest  thinkers 
of  antiquity,  that  it  is  "history's  highest  function  to  let  no  worthy 
action  be  uncommemorated,  and  to  hold  the  reprobation  of  posterity 
as  a  terror  to  evil  words  and  deeds."  ^  This  is  to  be  done  without 
bitterness  or  favor  {sine  ira  et  studio).^  There  was  also  more  of 
the  poet  in  his  make-up  than  in  any  other  antique  historian.  His 
sense  of  words,  his  use  of  compressed,  epigrammatic  phrases  are 
genuinely  poetical  devices.^  And  still  more  poetical  than  these  im- 
plements of  expression  are  the  wealth  of  color  and  variety  of  action 
which  give  the  illusion  of  life  to  his  pages.  In  a  remarkable  passage, 
a  great  modern  Hellenist  has  described  the  masterpieces  of  Greek 
history  as  suggestive  of  bas-reliefs,  thin  in  outline  and  low  in 
tone.^  They  are  conceived  in  one  dimension,  as  it  were;  lacking 
in  depth  and  motion.  This  is  just  what  Tacitus  supplies  to  antique 
historiography.  He  is  a  romanticist  as  opposed  to  their  classicism ; 
a  genius  with  the  creative  grasp  of  a  Victor  Hugo  but  holding  him- 
self in,  consciously,  from  that  "folly  of  extremes"  which  is  the  dan- 
ger fronting  those  who  can  carry  their  art  so  far. 

Restraint  with  power  behind  it;    in  this  respect  at  least,  the 
genius  of  Tacitus  is  a  living  embodiment  of  that  of  Rome. 

1  Tacitus,  The  Annals,  Bk.  XIII,  Chap.  III. 

2  Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  LXV.  »  /j/^.^  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I. 
*  Cf.  H.  Furneaux,  The  Annals  of  Tacitus,  Vol.  I,  p.  40. 

^  A.  and  M.  Croiset,  Histoirc  de  la  literature  grccque,  Vol.  II,  p.  568. 


TACITUS  271 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Tacitus'  works  are  the  early  Dialogus  de  Oratoribus,  a  treatise  of  much  in- 
terest for  the  study  of  the  influences  forming  his  ideas  on  history  as  well  as 
oratory;  De  Vita  et  Morihus  Julii  Agricolae,  the  biography  of  his  father-in-law 
written  somewhat  in  the  manner  of  Sallust ;  Germania,  the  celebrated  descrip- 
tion of  Germany ;  Historiae,  covering  the  years  69  to  96,  including  the  reigns  of 
Galba,  Otho,  Vitellius,  Vespasian,  Titus  and  Domitian.  It  originally  ex- 
tended over  some  fourteen,  or  perhaps  twelve,  books,  but  only  the  first  four 
and  half  of  the  fifth  have  been  preserved;  Ab  Excessu  Divi  Augusti,  known 
generally  as  the  Annates,  in  sixteen  or  eighteen  books,  covering  the  years  14  to 
68  A.D. ,  from  the  death  of  Augustus  to  that  of  Nero,  and  hence  including  the  reigns 
of  Tiberius,  Caligula,  Claudius  and  Nero.  The  manuscripts  upon  which  our 
texts  rest  do  not  go  beyond  the  tenth  or  eleventh  centuries,  and  for  the  first  six 
books  of  the  Annals  there  is  only  a  single  manuscript,  discovered  in  the  fifteenth 
century.  There  has  been  an  attempt  to  prove  it  the  forgery  of  the  humanist 
Poggio  Bracciolini,  but  the  genuineness  of  the  text  is  now  not  questioned.  The 
best  edition  of  the  text  of  the  Historiae  for  English  readers  is  that  by  VV.  A. 
Spooner  (1891),  of  the  Annates,  that  by  H.  Furneaux  (2  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1896- 
1907),  both  of  which  have  elaborate  notes  in  English.  The  standard  edition 
of  the  text  by  C.  Halm  has  been  brought  up  to  date  (2  vols.,  5th  ed.,  Teubner, 
1913-1914)  and  that  by  J.  OrelH  has  been  revised  and  reedited  by  H.  Schweiger- 
Sidler,  G.  Andresen  and  A.  Meiser  (2  vols.,  2d  ed.,  1877-1895).  Latest  edi- 
tions of  the  text  of  the  Annates  by  C.  Nipperdey  and  G.  Andresen  are  those  of 
1904-1908  and  1915  (2  vols.,  1904-1908),  (Bks.  I-VI,  nth  ed.,  1915).  There 
is  an  edition  of  the  Annates  by  C.  D.  Fisher  (Oxford  Library  of  Classical  Authors, 
1906).  Of  translations,  that  used  here,  and  the  most  generally  known,  is  by 
A.  J.  Church  and  W.  J.  Brodribb  {Annals,  1869,  Histories,  2d  ed.,  1872,  and 
frequent  reprints).  The  translation  in  Everyman's  Library  (2  vols.,  1908) 
is  that  of  A.  Murphy,  first  published  in  1793.  More  recent  translations  are 
those  by  G.  G.  Ramsay  {Annals,  2  vols.,  1904-1909;  Histories,  1915),  and  by 
W.  Peterson  and  M.  Hutton  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  (1914). 

The  chief  work  on  the  style  of  Tacitus  is  A.  A.  Draeger's  Ueber  Syntax 
und  Stit  des  Tacitus  (3d  ed.,  1882).  In  France  the  studies  of  P.  Fabia  have 
gained  wide  recognition,  especially  his  discussion  of  the  sources  Tacitus  used, 
Les  Sources  de  Tacite  dans  les  histoires  et  les  annates  (1893),  in  which  he  argues, 
as  does  also  E.  G.  Hardy,  Studies  in  Roman  History  (1910),  for  the  theory  that 
Tacitus  reUed  chiefly  upon  a  work  of  the  elder  Pliny.  In  spite  of  the  careful 
analysis  of  text  upon  which  this  theory  rests,  E.  Courbaud,  in  Les  procedes  d'art 
de  Tacite  dans  les  "Histoires"  (1918),  very  aptly  points  out  that  such  a  conclusion 
seems  incredible  in  view  of  the  character  of  the  younger  Phny's  comments  on 
Tacitus.  Further  discussion  may  be  followed  in  the  two  works  of  H.  Peter 
frequently  referred  to  in  the  text,  Die  geschichtliche  Litteratur  Uber  die  romische 
Kaiserzeit  bis  Theodosius  I  und  ihre  Qucllen  (2  vols.,  1897),  and  Wahrhcil  und 
Kunst  (1911),  and  in   German  dissertations  and  many  articles  in  classical 


272     INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF   HISTORY 

reviews.  For  recent  bibliographies  see  the  Jahresbericht  iiber  die  Fortschritte  der 
klassischen  Altertumswissenschaft,  Sup.  Vol.  CLXV  (1913),  pp.  224  sqq.,  and  Vol. 
CLXVII  (1914),  pp.  201  sqq.,  which  covers  the  literature  from  1904  to  1912; 
see  also  Vol.  CLXXIII  (191 5),  pp.  87  sqq.,  pp.  216  sqq.;  Vol.  CLXXVII  (1916- 
1918),  pp.  87  sq.,  pp.  251  sqq.  The  Uterature  in  Tacitus  is  continually  growing, 
and  manuals  like  Teufiel-Schwabe  are  inadequate  in  this  case.  This  continued 
interest  is  itself  a  reason  for  still  further  output,  since  the  critical  student  of 
historiography  has  obviously  here  a  problem  in  the  art  if  not  in  the  science  of 
history  developed  as  seldom  elsewhere  in  historical  Uterature,  —  that  of  per- 
sonality.   Pliny  was  right  as  to  the  immortality  of  such  work. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 
FROM  SUETONIUS  TO  AMMIANUS  MARCELLINUS 

There  were  two  of  Tacitus'  contemporaries  who  rivalled  him  in 
that  part  of  his  work  where  he  was  most  successful,  —  portraiture ; 
Plutarch,  the  Greek,  and  Suetonius,  the  Roman  biographer,  were 
both  of  his  time ;  and  all  three  used  to  some  degree  the  same  ma- 
terials. Indeed  there  is  so  much  resemblance  between  Plutarch's 
lives  of  Galba  and  Otho  and  the  description  of  the  reigns  of  these  two 
emperors  by  Tacitus  in  his  Histories,  that  critics,  after  the  most 
minute  analysis  of  the  two  texts,  are  still  unable  to  agree  as  to 
whether  one  of  them  was  dependent  upon  the  other,  and  if  so  which 
one ;  or  whether  both  depend  upon  a  common  source ;  while  the 
relation  of  Suetonius  to  them,  and  in  general  to  Tacitus,  remains  one 
of  the  most  interesting  problems  in  source-criticism.^  However 
that  may  be,  the  vogue  of  biographies  in  this  age  is  indicative  of 
the  same  tendencies  and  limitations  we  have  noted  in  Tacitus.  It 
is  not  merely  the  interest  in  character  or  characters  which  is  sig- 
nificant ;  that  is  peculiar  to  no  one  age  since  it  belongs  to  all.  It  is 
the  concentration  of  interest  upon  individuality  to  the  exclusion 
of  the  larger  social  or  political  view. 

Suetonius  Tranquillus  (c.  75-160  a.d.)  was,  like  Tacitus,  an  up- 
per class  Roman  who  devoted  himself  to  scholarship ;  by  no  means 
so  much  a  personage  as  Tacitus,  but  perhaps  more  of  a  scholar. 
In  his  researches  he  reminds  one  of  Varro,  for  he  had  a  perfect  mania 
for  finding  and  noting  all  kinds  of  details,  physical  peculiarities, 
trivial  incidents,  obscure  situations,  in  short  all  the  miscellany  that 
might  go  into  an  encyclopaedic  Notes  and  Queries  dealing  with 
biography.  He  ultimately  held  a  position  where  his  insatiable 
curiosity  could  have  full  play,  as  secretary  to  Hadrian's  praetorian 
prefect,  Septicius  Clarus,  a  position  which  opened  to  him  the  secret 
documents  of  the  imperial  cabinet.     The  result  was  a  work  as  dif- 

*  See  the  discussion  referred  to  in  the  Bibliographical  Note  on  Tacitus'  works. 

273 


274    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

ferent  as  possible  from  Tacitus',  yet  sharing  the  same  immortahty 
by  reason  of  the  subjects  of  which  it  treated. 

The  Lives  of  the  Casars  {De  Vita  CcBsarum  .  .  .  )  is  a  collec- 
tion of  biographies  in  eight  books.  The  first  six  books  are  each 
devoted  to  the  life  of  a  single  emperor  (Caesar  to  Nero),  but  the 
seventh  book  covers  the  revolutionary  year  69  with  the  three  em- 
perors it  produced,  and  the  Flavians  make  up  the  eighth.  It  was 
published  in  the  year  120  a.d.,  and  so  Tacitus,  in  his  old  age, 
after  "enjoying  the  serene  glory  of  a  great  and  serious  historian,"  ^ 
may  have  enjoyed  reading  that  anecdotal  counterpart  to  his  grave 
and  unbending  narrative.  For  the  work  of  Suetonius  is  the  very 
antithesis  of  the  Annals.  It  is,  indeed,  something  of  a  new  genre. 
As  Boissier  has  so  well  put  it : 

"We  plainly  perceive  in  reading  the  Lives  of  the  Ccesars,  that  the  author 
has  aimed  at  making  a  work  of  a  new  order ;  he  has  avoided  including  what 
was  to  be  found  in  history  as  it  was  understood  before  him.  He  has  not  ar- 
ranged events  in  chronological  sequence,  which  is  a  rule  of  the  historic  art ; 
rhetoric  is  quite  absent ;  political  views  and  general  reflections  occupy  small 
space ;  he  has  made  no  pretence  of  teaching.  On  the  other  hand,  anecdotes 
abound,  told  simply,  without  any  attempt  at  effect  or  pictorial  treatment. 
We  read  in  his  pages  original  documents,  letters  especially,  when  they  throw 
some  light  on  the  great  man  he  is  describing ;  the  witticisms  fathered  on  him 
and  those  made  at  his  expense ;  the  monuments  he  has  erected  or  restored  are 
enumerated ;  the  games  he  has  given  the  people,  a  universal  passion  at  the 
time ;  the  signs  which  have  announced  his  death,  for  the  author  is  very  super- 
stitious and  his  readers  still  more  so  ;  finally,  we  are  provided  with  his  physical 
portrait,  in  which  nothing  is  omitted,  from  the  dimensions  of  his  figure  to  the 
colour  of  his  eyes.  Suetonius  has  no  compunction  in  telling  us  without  any 
reticence  all  known  of  his  infirmities;  how  Caesar  combed  his  hair  over  his 
forehead  to  conceal  his  baldness,  how  Claudius  sputtered  and  jogged  his  head 
in  speaking,  how  Domitian,  who  had  been  a  very  handsome  lad  when  young,  was 
afflicted  towards  the  end  with  a  huge  stomach  borne  on  thin  legs,  and  only 
found  consolation  in  saying,  '  that  there  is  nought  more  pleasing  than  beauty, 
but  also  nought  that  passes  more  quickly.'  Here,  obviously,  we  are  at  the 
antipodes  of  ancient  history.  It  is  highly  probable  that  works  of  this  order 
held  no  very  high  place  in  the  hierarchy  of  literary  forms  drawn  up  by  the 
grammarians  of  the  time.  Never  would  Pliny,  who  knew  and  liked  them  both, 
have  committed  the  impropriety  of  putting  Suetonius  on  a  level  with  Tacitus. 
Tacitus  is  a  great  personage,  a  serious  man,  a  senator,  a  consul,  who  'graves 
for  eternity.'     Suetonius  is  but  an  advocate,  a  student  (scholasticus),  who  wants 

1  G.  Boissier,  Tacitus  and  Other  Roman  Studies,  p.  78.  The  extract  quoted  pre- 
cedes this  remark. 


FROM  SUETONIUS  TO  AMMIANUS  MARCELLINUS    275 

to  divert  his  contemporaries.  And  yet  Suetonius  has  created  a  form  which  is 
to  last  so  long  as  the  Empire  and  he  survive.  History  shall  scarce  be  written 
henceforth  save  on  the  model  he  has  designed  ;  on  the  contrary,  whilst  Tacitus 
is  always  admired,  he  will  never  again  be  imitated.  He  was  almost  the  last 
of  the  historians  who  wrote  in  the  ancient  fashion." 

From  the  day  of  Hadrian,  the  decline  in  Latin  literature  which 
had  already  set  in  proceeded  rapidly.  Greek  historians,  it  is  true, 
to  some  extent  made  up  for  the  deficiency,  as  we  have  already  seen, 
although  very  hurriedly.  But  there  were  no  western  counterparts 
to  Appian,  Arrian  or  Cassius  Dio ;  and,  apart  from  the  pleasant 
miscellany  of  the  Attic  Nights  (Noctes  Atticae)  of  Aulus  Gellius 
(born  c.  130),  with  their  scraps  of  information,  and  some  epitomes 
of  history,  paring  down  the  old  masters,  we  have  httle  but  bio- 
graphical continuations  of  Suetonius  to  record,  until  the  very  clos- 
ing days  of  imperial  history. 

Of  these,  a  certain  Marius  Maximus  (c.  165-230),  carried  the 
biographies  of  emperors  down  from  Nerva  to  Elagabalus.^  His 
work  seems  still  to  have  been  a  creditable  performance.  Others 
continued  at  this  popular  substitute  for  history ;  and  finally,  some 
one  gathered  together  a  collection  from  Hadrian  to  Numerianus 
(117-284  A.D.),  drawn  from  the  works  of  some  six  so-called  Scrip- 
tores  Historiae  Augustae.  These  are  frankly  mediaeval  in  style 
and  content.  Servile  in  tone,  they  are  both  trivial  and  self-con- 
tradictory in  a  helpless  sort  of  way.  It  is  hardly  an  apology  for 
them  to  say  that,  after  all,  "they  mean  well  and  intend  to  state 
what  is,  or  what  they  beHeve  to  be,  the  truth.  Where  they  go 
astray,  they  are  rather  dupes  than  impostors."  ^ 

After  such  a  foretaste  of  the  Middle  Ages,  it  is  with  distinct 
surprise  that,  just  as  we  are  entering  those  ages  in  reality,  we  come 
upon  the  single,  outstanding  figure  of  a  good  historian,  —  a  Greek 
but  writing  in  Latin  a  continuation,  not  of  Suetonius  but  of  Tacitus. 

Ammianus  Marcellinus  (c.  330-400  a.d.)  was  a  native  of  Antioch 
who  fought  with  the  Roman  armies  all  along  the  threatened  fron- 
tiers, east  and  west.  He  knew  the  world  of  the  barbarians  as  well 
as  the  culture  of  the  empire ;  and  his  rich  and  varied  experiences 
but  strengthened  his  large  share  of  native  common-sense.      The 

^  Cf.  H.  Peter,  Die  geschichtliche  Utteratiir  .  .  .  ,  Vol.  LI,  pp.  io6  sqq. 
^  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cit.,  Vol.  II,  Sect.  392. 


276     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE   HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

combination  of  plentiful  information  and  good  judgment  did  not 
produce  a  work  of  genius ;  but  the  Rerum  Gestarum  Libri,  which 
carried  the  story  of  Rome  from  Nerva  to  the  death  of  Valens  (96- 
378  A.D.),  was  a  performance  worthy  of  the  best  company  in  an- 
tique historiography.  Only  the  more  contemporary  sections 
(Bks.  XIV-XXXV)  have  been  preserved.  As  they  cover  but  the 
years  353  to  378  a.d.,  it  is  evident  that  either  the  early  books  were 
relatively  slight  and  introductory,  or  that  those  we  have  belong 
only  to  a  division  of  the  whole  series,  deahng  with  contemporary 
history,  —  much  as  Tacitus  separated  his  Histories  from  his  Annals} 
In  any  case,  all  that  we  have  of  Ammianus  is  the  history  of  the 
last  twenty-five  years  preceding  the  battle  of  Adrianople. 

This  last  work  of  Roman  history  is  frankly  that  of  a  soldier,^ 
a  blunt,  sincere  man,  honest  and  open-minded,  a  pagan,  yet  tolerant 
of  Christians,  not  thoroughly  at  home  in  his  study,  yet  proud  of 
his  scholarship,  writing  with  the  colloquial  turn  of  a  man  of  affairs 
and  still  turning  it  to  use  by  preparing  a  history  which  was  to  be 
read  in  public.  There  is  almost  a  touch  of  romance  in  the  fact 
that  this  is  so ;  that  the  last  of  the  antique  histories  was  to  be  de- 
claimed, in  competition  with  the  output  of  the  rhetoricians,  the 
way  the  history  of  Herodotus  was  given  to  his  age.  Ammianus 
seems  to  have  tried  hard  to  brush  up  his  Latin  for  such  public  pres- 
entation, but,  in  spite  of  his  residence  at  Rome  while  he  was  writing 
it,  his  expressions  remain  clumsy,  and  obvious  affectations  even 
render  the  text  obscure.  It  is  only  when  one  compares  him  with 
any  other  Latin  historian  for  centuries  before  or  after  him  that  one 
appreciates  his  value  as  a  straightforward,  if  somewhat  awkward, 
witness  to  the  truth.  No  fitter  tribute  has  ever  been  paid  him  than 
that  by  the  greatest  historian  who  has  ever  dealt  with  the  fortunes 
of  Rome.  For  when  Gibbon  parted  company  with  him,  at  the 
year  378,  he  took  the  occasion  to  bid  Ammianus  the  farewell  of  a 
fellow-craftsman  worthy  of  mastership  in  the  guild  of  history.^ 

^  Cf.  Teuffel-Schwabe,  op.  cit.,  Vol.  II,  Sect.  429,  n.  3. 

2  Vide  T.  R.  Glover,  Life  and  Letters  in  the  Fourth  Century  (1901),  Chap.  II. 

'  Cf.  E.  Gibbon,  The  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  Chap.  XXVI.  (J.  B. 
Bury's  edition,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  122.) 

"It  is  not  without  the  most  sincere  regret  that  I  must  now  take  leave  of  an  ac- 
curate and  faithful  guide,  who  has  composed  the  history  of  his  own  times  without 
indulging  the  prejudices  and  passions  which  usually  affect  the  mind  of  a  contemporary." 


FROM  SUETONIUS  TO  AMMIANUS  MARCELLINUS     277 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

There  are  editions  of  the  text  of  Suetonius  by  C.  L.  Roth  (Teubner,  1858, 
reprinted  1886)  and  by  M.  Ihm  (Teubner,  Vol.  I,  1908).  The  De  Vita  Ccb- 
sarum  {Divus  Julius;  Divus  Augustus)  has  been  edited  with  notes  in  Enghsh, 
by  H.  T.  Peck  (1889)  and  {Divus  Augustus),  by  E.  S.  Shuckburgh  (1896). 
For  extracts  see  H.  Peter,  Historicorum  Romanormn  Reliquiae  (2  vols.,  1906- 
1914),  Vol.  II,  pp.  54  sqq.  The  translation  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library  is 
by  J.  C.  Rolfe  (2  vols.,  1914-1920).  A.  Mace,  Essai  sur  Suetone  (Bibliotheque 
des  ecoles  frangaises  d'Athens  et  de  Rome,  Vol.  LXXXII,  1900)  gives  an  ex- 
haustive bibliography.  For  bibliographical  material  see  Jahreshcricht  iiber 
die  Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Altertumswissenschaft,  Vol.  CXXXIV  (1907), 
pp.  237  sqq.,  for  1 897-1 906 ;  Vol.  CLXXIII  (1915),  p.  87,  p.  215;  Vol. 
CLXXVII  (1916-1918),  p.  86,  p.  250. 

The  most  recent  edition  of  Aulus  Gellius'  Nodes  Atticae  is  by  C.  Hosius 
(2  vols.,  1903).  There  is  an  old  translation  by  A.  Beloe,  The  Attic  Nights 
(3  vols.,  1793).  On  the  Scriptores  Historiae  Augustae  see  H.  Peter,  Die  geschicht- 
liche  Litteratur  iiber  die  romische  Kaiserzeit  bis  Theodosius  I  und  ihre  Quellen 
(2  vols.,  1897),  Vol.  II,  and  his  bibliographical  survey  in  Jahresbericht  iiber  die 
Fortschritte  der  klassischen  Alter tumswissetischajt.  Vol.  CXXX  (1906),  pp.  i  sqq.; 
see  also  Sup.  Vol.  CLVI  (191 2),  pp.  73  sqq. 

Editions  of  the  text  of  Ammianus  Marcellinus  are  by  F.  Eyssenhardt 
(1871),  V.  Gardthausen  (2  vols.,  1874-1875)  and  by  C.  U.  Clark  (2  vols.,  1910- 
1915).  The  translation  by  C.  D.  Yonge  in  Bohn's  Classical  Library  has  not 
yet  been  superseded  but  a  translation  by  C.  U.  Clark  has  been  announced 
by  the  Loeb  Classical  Library.  Among  the  many  articles  on  Ammianus 
mention  should  be  made  of  those  by  T.  R.  Glover  in  Life  and  Letters  in  the  Fourth 
Century  (1901),  Chap.  II,  and  S.  Dill  in  Roman  Society  in  the  Last  Century  of 
the  Western  Empire  (2d  ed.,  1899,  reprinted  1906),  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I.  Recent 
bibliographical  material  will  be  found  in  Jahresbericht,  etc..  Sup.  Vol.  CLVI 
(1912),  pp.  95  sqq.;  Vol.  CLXXVII  (1916-1918),  p.  61,  p.  227. 


SECTION   V 
CHRISTIANITY   AND   HISTORY 

CHAPTER  XXIV 
THE  NEW  ERA 

The  great  historians  of  antiquity  were  writers  of  modern  his- 
tory. Herodotus,  Thucydides,  Polybius,  Tacitus,  were  inter- 
ested in  what  had  happened  because  of  what  was  happening,  and 
great  things  were  happening  in  their  day.  Herodotus  writing, 
as  he  said,  *'in  order  that  the  great  and  wondrous  deeds  of  both 
Greeks  and  barbarians  may  not  be  effaced  by  time"  massed  his 
facts  around  that  world-stirring  crisis  which  had  just  been  passed, 
the  Persian  wars.  Thucydides,  persuaded  that  "  former  ages  were 
not  great  either  in  their  wars  or  in  anything  else,"  beheved  that  the 
war  that  passed  before  his  eyes  was  the  greatest  event  in  the  world's 
history,  and  he  bent  his  life's  energies  to  describing  it.  Polybius, 
too,  carried  oflf  to  Rome  in  the  track  of  her  victorious  armies,  saw 
as  a  captive  the  miraculous  dawn  of  that  first  empire  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean world,  and  he  wrote  his  history  to  explain  it.  Livy's  vision 
was  also  always  fastened  upon  the  imperial  present  and  the  calm, 
clear-headed  patriotism  which  had  brought  it  about.  Tacitus 
lacked  this  generous  enthusiasm,  but  his  interests  were  not  anti- 
quarian ;  the  great  age  in  which  he  lived  drew  his  observation  and 
supplied  him  with  his  task.  From  the  clash  of  East  and  West 
in  the  Ionian  cities  in  the  sixth  century  B.C.,  whereby  the  critical 
curiosity  of  men  and  societies  was  first  made  active,  to  the  tragic 
close  of  the  drama  of  the  ancient  world,  almost  a  thousand  years 
later,  history  was  centred  upon  the  great  events  and  the  characters 
that  dominated  the  world  in  which  each  writer  lived. 

But  there  was  one  event  of  supreme  importance  that  had  no 
Herodotus  to  gather  up  its  details,  no  Polybius  to  weld  it  into  the 
world's  history  with  scientific  insight  and  critical  acumen  —  the 

278 


THE   NEW   ERA 


279 


rise  of  Christianity.^  The  product  of  obscure  enthusiasts  in  an 
obscure  and  despised  Oriental  people,  it  did  not  win  more  than  a 
disdainful  paragraph  (in  Tacitus)  at  the  hands  of  pagan  historians. 
Its  own  writings  were  but  poor  attempts  at  history  compared  with 
what  other  lesser  events  produced.  When  the  scanty  texts  of  the 
sayings  and  doings  of  Jesus  were  taking  the  shape  in  which  we  have 
them  now,  a  Plutarch  was  writing  biographies  of  all  the  pagan 
heroes.  But  no  Christian  Plutarch  appeared  for  another  three 
centuries ;  and  then  all  that  the  learned  Jerome  was  able  to  pre- 
serve for  us  was  three  or  four  paragraphs  on  the  lives  of  the  lead- 
ing apostles.- 

There  were  several  reasons  for  this.  In  the  first  place  Chris- 
tianity began  in  a  most  humble  way  and  among  the  unlettered.  It 
did  not  burst  out  in  a  flame  of  conquest  like  Mohammedanism,  but 
crept,  half-hidden,  along  the  foundations  of  society.  Its  very  ob- 
scurity left  little  to  chronicle.  If  it  changed  the  lives  of  men,  they 
were  lives  too  insignificant  to  be  noticed  by  history.  Only  in  the 
present  age,  after  democracy  itself  has  learned  to  read  and  begun 
to  think,  is  the  historian  awakening  to  the  spiritual  forces  in  the 
lives  of  the  obscure.  But  even  now  we  pay  little  attention  to  such 
seemingly  extraneous  elements  as  the  beliefs  of  foreign  immigrants 
settled  in  our  city  slums  —  the  class  that  furnished  the  majority  of 
the  early  converts  to  Christianity.  In  any  case  the  Greco-Roman 
world  troubled  itself  little  about  the  history  of  the  Jews  and  less 
still  about  that  of  the  Christians.^ 

Even  when  Christianity  had  penetrated  the  society  of  the 
learned,    moreover,    it    stimulated    little    historical    investigation. 

*  Cf.  H.  von  Soden,  Das  Intcresse  des  apostolischen  Zeitalters  an  der  evangelischcn 
Geschichte,  in  Theologische  Abhandlungcn  (1892),  pp.  113-169. 

2  Jerome's  De  Viris  Illiistribus,  written  after  the  model  of  the  work  of  the  same 
name  by  Suetonius. 

^  The  emphasis  which  subsequent  ages  has  placed  upon  references  to  Judaism  and 
Christianity  in  pagan  writers  has  given  those  passages  an  altogether  factitious  promi- 
nence. There  are  at  best  only  a  very  few,  and  those  are  mostly  either  incidental  or 
pointed  with  ridicule.  See  T.  Reinach,  Textes  d'auleurs  grccs  ct  romains  rclalifs  au 
judaisme,  reunis,  traduits  ct  annates;  the  opening  sections  of  the  important  work  of 
J.  Juster,  Les  Jidfs  dans  V empire  romain,  leur  condition  jiiridique,  cconomique  et  sociale 
(2  vols.,  1914).  E.  Schiirer's  Geschichte  des  jiidischen  Volkcs  im  Zeitalter  Jesti  Christi 
(also  in  English  translation)  remains  the  standard  work  on  the  period.  See  also 
articles  in  the  Jewish  Encyclopedia  dealing  with  the  Diaspora. 


28o    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Pagan  savants,  like  Celsus/  sometimes  challenged  the  sources  of 
Christian  tradition  and  scripture,^  but  for  the  most  part  the  great 
controversy  between  Christian  and  pagan  writers  took  place  in 
fields  that  lay  beyond  the  scope  of  history.  Christianity  was  a 
religion,  not  a  thing  of  politics,  and  although,  as  we  shall  see,  the 
problem  of  fitting  it  into  the  Jewish  and  then  into  the  gentile  setting 
^did  involve  historical  conceptions,  yet  the  main  interests  awakened 
by  it  were  theological.  This  meant  that  history,  as  a  record  of 
mere  human  events,  was  bound  to  suffer ;  for  theology,  in  so 
far  as  it  concerned  itself  with  those  events,  sought  to  transfer  them 
from  the  realm  of  human  action  to  that  of  divine  grace,  and  so  to 
interpret  the  phenomena  of  time  and  change  in  terms  of  a  time- 
VJess  and  unchanging  Deity .^  The  western  world  has  since  grate- 
fully built  its  theology  upon  the  conceptions  so  brilliantly  worked 
out  by  the  Fathers,  and  the  historian  whose  business  it  is  to  register 
the  judgments  of  society  cannot  fail  to  appreciate  their  great 
formative  influence  in  the  history  of  thought.  But  their  very 
\  'Success  was  a  loss  to  history ;  for  it  placed  the  meaning  of  human 
effort  outside  the  range  of  humanity,  and  thus  impressed  upon  the 
Lwestern  world  a  fundamentally  unhistorical  attitude  of  mind. 

The  motive  force  which  accomplished  this  theological  victory 
was  faith.  Faith  was  the  chief  intellectual  demand  which  Chris- 
tianity made  of  its  converts.^  By  it  the  mind  was  enabled  to  view 
events  in  a  perspective  which  reached  beyond  the  limits  of  time  and 
space  into  that  imaginary  over-world  which  we  know  as  Eternity. 
Faith  did  more  than  remove  mountains,  it  removed  the  whole  ma- 
terial environment  of  life.  There  have  been  few  such  triumphs  of 
the  spirit  as  it  achieved  in  those  early  days  of  the  new  religion. 
But  the  fact  remains  that  this  achievement  was  largely  at  the  cost 
fof  history.     Faith,  one  can  see  from  the  criticism  of  those  first  really 

1  Vide  infra,  pp.  294  sqq.  ^  As  Apion  did  those  of  the  Jews. 

3  It  is  significant  to  see  how  the  conception  of  the  essential  unhistoricity  of  God, 
as  a  Being  beyond  the  reach  of  change,  has  been  growingly  modified  in  modern  times. 
The  increase  in  the  number  of  those  mystics  who  have  revised  their  theology  in  terms 
of  modern  science  and  philosophy  (especially  Bergsonian)  is,  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  history  of  pure  thought,  the  most  decisive  triumph  of  the  historical  spirit.  The 
Deity  himself  becomes  historical ;  eternity  disappears ;  all  is  time  —  and  change. 

4  Charity  was  hardly  an  intellectual  virtue,  at  least  as  conceived  by  the 
Fathers. 


THE   NEW   ERA  281 

conscious  historians,  the  Ionian  Greeks,  is  an  impediment  to  genuine 
history,  unless  the  imagination  which  it  quickens  is  kept  within 
control.  The  historian  needs  rather  to  confine  his  imagination  by 
skepticism  and  to  be  more  upon  his  guard  against  believing  when- 
ever he  feels  the  will  to  believe  than  at  any  other  time  —  which,  in 
the  realm  of  religious  virtues,  has  sometimes  been  mistaken  for  a  sin.^ 
Moreover,  over  and  above  the  fact  that  faith  puts  a  premium  upon 
credulity,^  it  indicates  an  absence  of  any  real,  serious  interest  in 
historical  data.  When  one  "takes  a  thing  on  faith,"  it  is  because 
one  is  intent  upon  using  it  for  something  else  of  more  importance  — 
so  important,  indeed,  that  often  while  still  unrealized  it  can  clothe 
with  reality  the  very  condition  upon  which  it  depends.  Thus  the 
"will  to  believe"  can  master  phenomena  in  a  way  not  permitted  to 
historians.  Faith  and  scientific  history  do  not  readily  work  together.^ 
If  this  is  clear  in  the  dawn  of  Greek  history,  when  science  first 
challenged  faith,  it  stands  out  even  more  clearly  still  in  that  very 
antithesis  of  the  creations  of  Hellas,  which  we  may  best  term  the 
gospel  according  to  Paul.^  Nowhere  else  in  the  world's  Hterature'' 
is  there  a  call  to  faith  like  that  of  Paul,  and  few,  even  of  the  great 
creators  of  religious  doctrine,  have  been  more  indifferent  than  he  to 
the  historical  data,  upon  which,  in  the  order  of  nature,  that  faith 
would  seem  to  rest.  The  Apostle  to  the  Gentiles  cared  little  for 
the  details  of  the  life  of  Jesus,  and  boasted  of  his  indifference.^ 
He  learned  of  the  divinity  of  Christ  by  a  flash  of  revelation  which 
marked  him  out  as  one  of  the  prophets.  Then  the  desert,  rather 
than  Jerusalem,  furnished  him  that  tremendous  plan  of  Christian 
doctrine  upon  which  Christian  orthodoxy  still  rests,  which  included 
the  whole  drama  of  humanity  from  the  Creation  and  the  Fall  to  the 
Redemption  and  the  vision  of  its  meaning,  revealed  on  the  road  to 
Damascus.  The  plan  was  based  upon  the  law  and  the  prophets, 
but  only  because  Paul's  thought  ran  in  terms  of  their  teaching. 
His  scheme  was  one  that  needed  no  verification  from  the  sources 


1  There  are  all  kinds  of  faith,  to  be  sure.  We  are  speaking  only  of  religious  faith 
which  transfers  phenomena  from  the  natural  to  the  supernatural  world  and  is,  there- 
fore, the  chief  opponent  of  rationalism. 

2  As  Celsus,  the  pagan  critic,  so  cogently  suggested. 

^  And  we  must  regard  Paul  as  the  intellectual  creator  of  Christian  theology. 
*  Cf.  the  first,  second  and  third  chapters  of  The  Epistle  to  the  Galatians. 


282     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

even  of  sacred  scripture,  if  once  it  could  carry  conviction  by  inner 
experience.^ 

Finally  the  faith  of  early  Christianity  was  largely  involved  in  a 
doctrine  which  centred  attention  not  in  this  world  but  in  the  world 
to  come  ;  and  the  world  to  come  was  about  to  come  at  any  moment. 
Immortality  for  the  individual  was  a  doctrine  shared  by  other 
mystery  religions  of  the  pagan  world ;  but  only  Christianity  de- 
veloped —  out  of  the  apocalyptic  literature  of  the  Jews  —  the 
vaster  dream  of  an  imminent  cataclysm  in  which  the  world  to  come 
should  come  for  all  at  once.  While  this  doctrine  appears  in  full 
force  in  Christian  circles  only  from  the  latter  part  of  the  first  to  the 
middle  of  the  second  century,  and  was  most  developed  in  circles 
given  over  to  what  might  be  viewed,  even  by  ecclesiastics,  as  ex- 
treme spirituahty,  it  undoubtedly  had  a  large  and  damaging  in- 
ifluence  upon  Christian  historiography.  There  is  nothing  which 
so  effectively  destroys  our  interest  in  the  past  as  to  live  under  the 
Jshadow  of  a  great  and  impending  event.  It  would  not  have  been 
the  same  had  each  individual  convert  merely  been  keenly  aware 
of  the  shortness  of  his  own  life  and  the  vision  of  the  coming  day  of 
judgment.  That  is  still  and  has  always  been  a  perspective  be- 
fore religious  minds ;  and  however  strange  it  may  seem,  it  does 
not  entirely  kill  the  interest  in  the  origin  and  evolution  of  these 
things  which  are  so  soon  to  vanish  from  before  the  eyes  of  death. 
Such  is  the  vital  instinct  in  us.^  But  it  is  a  different  thing  for 
heaven  and  earth  and  all  mankind  to  pass  away  at  once  as  these 
early  Christians  expected  them  to  do  at  any  time.  A  few  years 
ago  we  were  to  traverse  the  tail  of  a  comet  and  there  was  some 
speculation  as  to  whether  its  deadly  gases  might  not  exterminate 
all  life  on  this  globe.  Had  the  probability  been  more  probable, 
had  astronomers  and  men  of  science  determined  the  fact  by  some 
experimental  proof,  with  what  breathless  and  hypnotic  gaze  we 
should  have  watched  the  measured  coming  of  that  star  across  the 

^  The  Pauline  doctrine  involved  a  conceptual  parallel  to  history,  which  apparently 
furnished  a  better  past  to  the  world,  one  more  reasonable  and  more  probable  than  that 
which  actually  had  been  the  case. 

2  The  influence  of  the  belief  in  immortality  upon  historical  perspectives  invites 
our  attention  here;  but  the  subject  is  too  intricate  for  hurried  consideration.  Un- 
doubtedly the  emphasis  upon  a  contrast  between  time  and  eternity  obscured  the 
meaning  of  phenomena  in  their  time-setting. 


THE   NEW   ERA  283 

gulfs  of  space  !  Our  vast,  unresting  industries  would  have  ceased ; 
for  there  would  have  been  no  tomorrow  to  supply.  Our  discoveries  in 
science,  our  creations  in  art  would  have  been  like  so  many  useless 
monuments  in  an  untenanted  world  —  and  science  and  art  would 
have  had  no  incentive  to  go  on.  The  one  interest  for  us  all  would 
have  been  that  growing  point  of  light  —  that  doom,  swift,  inevit- 
able, universal.  Here  comes  a  problem  in  psychology.  For  as  a 
matter  of  fact  that  same  doom  is  coming ;  we  know  it  with  absolute 
certainty ;  we  know  there  can  be  no  escape.  How  many  of  those 
who  saw  that  comet  pass  will  be  alive  fifty  years  from  now  ?  In  a 
century,  at  most,  the  earth  will  be  the  sepulchre  of  all  —  just  as 
much  a  sepulchre  as  if  the  race  had  perished  in  one  grand  catastro- 
phe. And  what  a  little  interval  is  a  century  !  Yet  our  mills  work 
on,  our  discoveries  continue,  our  art  goes  on  producing  its  visions 
of  beauty ;  and  above  all,  we  increase  our  interest  in  the  distant 
past,  digging  for  history  in  the  hills  of  Crete  and  Asia  and  working 
as  never  before  to  rescue  and  reconstruct  the  past  from  archives 
and  libraries.  Why?  Because  humanity  is  more  to  us  than  our  in- 
dividual lives ;  and  the  future  is  a  reality  through  it.  If  humanity 
were  to  disappear  and  no  future  be  possible,  we  should  lose  our  reck- 
oning, along  with  our  sense  of  values,  like  Browning's  Lazarus,  who 
has  had  a  vision  of  eternity,  but  has  lost  track  of  time. 

So  it  was  in  the  millennial  atmosphere  of  the  early  Church.  ' 
However  vaguely  or  definitely  the  triumph  of  "the  Kingdom"  was 
reckoned,^  the  belief  in  its  approach  carried  the  mind  away  from 

1  The  conception  of  a  millennium,  drawn  from  the  later  Jewish  literature,  was 
that  Christ  and  his  saints  would  rule  for  a  thousand  years ;  but  in  spite  of  much  cal- 
culation the  belief  was  never  quite  reduced  to  successful  mathematics.  It  is  inter- 
esting, in  passing,  to  see  how  it  drew  upon  that  other  interest  in  chronology,  the  plot- 
ting out  of  a  future  instead  of  a  past,  which  astrology  best  illustrates.  In  fact  the 
millennium  may  be  said  to  be  a  sort  of  Christian  equivalent  for  astrology.  In  the 
earlier  prophets  the  Messianic  Kingdom  is  to  last  forever  {cf.  Ezekiel  37",  etc.),  a  con- 
ception found  also  in  the  apostolic  age  (John  i2«<).  Jeremiah,  however,  had  risked 
a  prophecy  of  Jewish  delivery  from  captivity  at  the  end  of  seventy  years  (25'-),  but 
when  his  dream  of  deliverance  was  not  realized  the  later  prophets  had  to  find  an  ex- 
planation, and  apocalyptic  literature  developed  a  reckoning  which  should  save  the 
validity  of  the  earlier.  This  was  definitely  the  occasion  of  Daniel's  attempt  (q),  which 
has  taxed  the  mathematics  of  every  apocalyptic  dreamer  to  the  present  day.  The 
conception  of  a  thousand  years  came  late,  and  perhaps  rests  on  very  extended  use  of 
symbolic  interpretation.  According  to  Psalms  go*,  a  day  with  God  is  as  a  thousand 
years.    Combine  this  with  the  six  days  of  Creation  in  Genesis  and  by  analogy  the 


284    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

l^rthly  affairs  and  their  history.  Men  who  drew  their  inspiration 
from  it  had  but  Httle  interest  in  the  splendor  of  a  Roman  state  or 
in  the  long  procession  of  centuries  in  which  were  painfully  evolved 
the  institutions  of  pagan  law  and  government,  institutions  which 
not  only  safeguarded  the  heritage  of  antique  culture  but  made  pos- 
sible the  extension  of  Christianity. 

'  The  only  history  of  importance  to  the  Christian  was  that  which 
justified  his  faith,  and  it  all  lay  within  the  sacred  writings  of  the 
Jews.  So,  as  the  vision  of  the  judgment  day  became  fainter  and 
the  Church  proceeded  to  settle  itself  in  time  and  not  in  eternity, 
it  looked  back  to  a  different  past  from  that  which  lay  beyond  the 
pagan  world.     The  sacred  scriptures  of  the  Jews  had  replaced  the 

Uiterature  of  antiquity.  A  revolution  was  taking  place  in  the  his- 
tory of  History.  Homer  and  Thucydides,  Polybius  and  Livy,  the 
glory  of  the  old  regime,  shared  a  common  fate.  The  scientific  out- 
put of  the  most  luminous  minds  the  world  had  known  was  classed 
with  the  legends  that  had  grown  up  by  the  campfires  of  primitive 
barbarians.  All  was  pagan ;  which  meant  that  all  was  delusive  and 
unreliable  except  where  it  could  be  tested  in  the  light  of  the  new 
religion  or  where  it  forced  itself  by  the  needs  of  life  into  the  world 
of  common  experience. 

1  There  is  no  more  momentous  revolution  in  the  history  of  thought 
than  this,  in  which  the  achievements  of  thinkers  and  workers,  of 

world's  work  will  go  on  for  sLx  such  days,  or  six  thousand  years,  and  then  the  Messiah  will 
reign  for  a  Sabbath  of  a  thousand  years.  This  idea  is  found  only  once  in  the  Talmud. 
It  was  developed  for  Christians  in  Revelation  {cf.  20'',  "They  lived  and  reigned  with 
Christ  a  thousand  years").  Through  Jewish  and  Christian  apocalypses  the  doctrine 
was  taken  up,  sometimes  with,  sometimes  without,  the  mathematical  data.  By  the 
middle  of  the  second  century  it  began  to  subside,  and  although  Montanism  in  the 
early  third  century  revived  it,  it  was  henceforth  regarded  as  somewhat  tinged  with 
heresy  and  Judaism.  In  the  learned  circles,  Neoplatonic  mysticism,  as  taught  by 
Origen,  superseded  the  crudities  of  the  millennistic  faith.  "It  was  only  the  chronol- 
ogists  and  historians  of  the  church  who,  following  Julius  Africanus,  made  use  of  apoc- 
alyptic numbers  in  their  calculations,  while  court  theologians  like  Eusebius  enter- 
tained the  imperial  table  with  discussions  as  to  whether  the  dining-hall  of  the  em- 
peror —  the  second  David  and  Solomon,  the  beloved  of  God  —  might  not  be  the  new 
Jerusalem  of  John's  Apocalypse."  (A.  Harnack,  article  Millennium  in  Encyclo- 
Padia  Britannica.  This  article  furnishes  an  admirable  survey  and  bibliography. 
See  the  treatment  of  Christian  eschatology  in  the  various  works  of  R.  H.  Charles  in 
the  field  of  apocalyptic  literature.) 


THE   NEW   ERA  285 

artists,  philosophers,  poets,  and  statesmen,  were  given  up  for  the 
revelation  of  prophets  and  a  gospel  of  worldly  renunciation.  The/ 
very  success  of  the  revolution  blinds  us  to  its  significance ;  for  our 
own  world-view  has  been  moulded  by  it.  Imagine,  for  instance,  what 
the  perspectives  of  history  would  have  been  had  there  been  no  Chris- 
tianity, or  if  it  had  remained  merely  a  sect  of  Judaism,  to  be  ignored 
or  scorned  !  Religion  carried  history  away  from  the  central  themes'^ 
of  antiquity  to  a  nation  that  had  little  to  offer  —  except  the  re- 
ligion. J 

The  story  of  Israel  could  not,  from  the  very  nature  of  its  situa- 
tion, be  more  than  an  incident  in  the  drama  of  nations.  The  great 
empires  of  the  east  lay  on  either  side  of  it,  and  the  land  of  promise 
turned  out  to  be  a  pathway  of  conquering  armies.  From  the  desert 
beyond  Jordan  new  migrations  of  Semite  nomads  moved  in  for  the 
plunder  of  the  Jews,  as  the  Jews  themselves  had  plundered  the  land 
before.  On  the  west,  Philistine  and  Phoenician  held  the  harbors  and 
the  sea.  Too  small  a  nation  for  a  career  of  its  own,  exposed  and 
yet  secluded,  the  borderer  of  civilization,  Israel  could  produce  no 
rich  culture  like  its  more  fortunately  situated  neighbors.  When 
unmolested  for  a  time,  it  too  could  achieve  rapid  progress  in  its 
fortress  towns.  But  no  sooner  was  its  wealth  a  temptation  than  the 
Assyrian  was  at  the  gates.  It  is  small  wonder,  then,  if  in  spite  of 
the  excellence  of  much  of  the  historical  literature  embedded  in  the 
Old  Testament,  even  the  best  of  it,  such  as  the  stories  woven  around 
the  great  days  of  Saul  and  David,  when  compared  with  the  narrative 
of  Polybius  or  even  with  that  of  Herodotus,  leaves  the  picture  of 
petty  kinglets  of  an  isolated  tribe,  reaching  out  for  a  brief  interval 
to  touch  the  splendors  of  Tyre  and  Sidon,  and  vaguely  aware  of 
the  might  and  wealth  of  Egypt. 

The  main  contribution  of  the  Jews  to  the  world  was  in  a  field 
which  offers  history  few  events  to  chronicle.  As  we  have  insisted 
above,  it  was  a  contribution  of  the  first  magnitude,  to  be  treasured 
by  succeeding  ages  above  all  the  arts  and  sciences  of  antiquity.  But ' 
its  very  superiority  lay  in  its  unworldliness,  in  its  indifference  to  the 
passing  fortunes  of  man  or  nations  which  make  up  the  theme  of 
history.  This,  at  least,  was  the  side  of  Judaism  which  Christianity^ 
seized  upon  and  emphasized.  But  there  could  be  little  for  history 
in  any  case  in  a  religion  born  of  national  disaster  and  speaking  by 


286     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

revelation.     The  religion  which  is  born  of  disaster  must  either  falsify 
reaHties  by  a   faith  which   reads  victory  in   defeat    or    it   must 
take  refuge  in  the  realm  of  the  spirit,  where    the  triumphs  of 
the  world,  its  enemy,  are  met  with  indifference  or  scorn.    In  either 
/case  the  perspective  is  distorted.     Revelation  may  save  the  future 
by  stirring  hope  and  awakening  confidence  ;  but  with  the  same  calm 
authority  with  which  it  dictates  the  conduct  of  the  present,  it  will 
falsify  the  past,  —  falsify,  that  is,  in  the  eyes  of  science.    In  its  own 
eyes  it  is  lord  of  circumstance  and  master  of  phenomena ;  and  the 
\records  of  the  centuries  must  come  to  its  standards,  not  it  to  theirs. 
(^     It  was,  therefore,  a  calamity  for  historiography,  that  the  new 
\   standards  won  the  day.     The  authority  of  a  revealed  religion  sanc- 
tioned but  one  scheme  of  history  through  the  vast  and  intricate 
evolution  of  the  antique  world.     A  well-nigh  insurmountable  ob- 
stacle was  erected  to  scientific  inquiry,  one  which  has  at  least  taken 
almost  nineteen  centuries  to  surmount. 

Not  only  was  the  perspective  perverted,  and  the  perversion  made 
into  a  creed,  but  the  stern  requirements  of  monotheistic  theology 
placed  a  veritable  barrier  against  the  investigation.  The  Christian 
■  historian  was  not  free  to  question  the  data  as  presented  to  him, 
J!  since  the  source  was  inspired.  He  might  sometimes  evade  the 
'  difficulty  by  reading  new  meanings  into  the  data  and  so  square  them 
with  the  rest  of  history,  a  device  employed  by  every  Father  of  the 
Church  whose  erudition  and  insight  brought  him  face  to  face  with 
the  difficulties  of  literal  acceptance  of  the  scriptures.  But  however 
one  might  twist  the  texts,  the  essential  outlines  of  the  scheme  of 
history  remained  fixed.  From  the  prophets  of  Jahveh  with  their 
high  fanaticism  and  from  Paul,  the  prophet  of  Jesus,  there  was  but 
one  world-view,  that  dominated  by  the  idea  of  a  chosen  people  and 
a  special  dispensation.  The  only  difference  between  Jewish  and 
IChristian  outlook  was  that  what  had  been  present  politics  became 
past  history.  The  apostle  to  the  Gentiles  did  not  give  up  the  Jew- 
ish past.  Pre-Christian  history  was  in  his  eyes  the  same  narrow 
story  of  exclusive  providence  as  it  was  in  the  eyes  of  the  older 
prophets.  Gentiles  had  had  no  share  in  the  dispensations  of 
Jahveh ;  it  was  only  for  the  present  and  future  that  they  might 
hope  to  enter  into  the  essential  processes  of  historical  evolution. 
The  past  to  Paul  was  what  it  was  to  a  Pharisee. 


THE   NEW   ERA  287 

This  exclusive  attitude  of  Christianity  with  reference  to  the  past 
was  in  striking  contrast  with  the  attitude  of  contemporaneous  pagan- 
ism, which  was  growing  liberal  with  increasing  knowledge.     To  ' 
attack  the  story  of  Jahveh's  governance  of  the  world  was,  for  a 
Christian,  sacrilege,  since  the  story  itself  was  sacred.     A  pagan,  with, 
a  whole  pantheon  to  turn  to,  placed  no  such  value  upon  any  one 
myth  and  therefore  was  free  to  discount  them  all.     His   eternal 
salvation  did  not  rest  upon  his  belief  in  them ;  and,  moreover,  he 
did  not  concern  himself  so  much  about  his  salvation  in  any  case. 
When  the  belief  in  an  immortality  was  bound  up  with  the  accept-'~| 
ance  of  a  scheme  of  history,  the  acceptance  was  assured.     What  is 
the  dead  past   of   other   people's  lives,  when  compared  with  the 
unending  future  of  one's  own  ?     History  yielded  to  the  demands  of 
eternity. 

Moreover  in  its  emphasis  upon  the  Messiahship  of  Jesus,  Chris- 
tianity fastened  upon  one  of  the  most  exclusive  aspects  of  Jewish 
thought.  Such  history  as  the  proof  of  this  claim  involved  was  along 
the  line  of  a  narrow,  fanatic,  national  movement.  Christianity,  it  is 
true,  opened  the  Messianic  Kingdom  to  the  whole  world,  but  it 
justified  its  confidence  in  the  future  by  an  appeal  to  the  stricter  out-"* 
lines  of  a  tribal  faith  in  the  past.  And  yet  that  appeal,  in  spite  of 
its  limitations,  was  the  source  of  such  historical  research  as  Chris- 
tianity produced.  For,  when  pressed  by  pagan  critics  to  reconcile 
their  claims  with  those  of  Greeks  or  Egyptians,  the  Fathers  were 
obliged  to  work  out  not  merely  a  theory  of  history  —  their  theology 
supplied  them  with  that  —  but  a  scheme  of  chronology.  The^ 
simple  problem,  so  lightly  attacked,  as  to  whether  Moses  or  the 
Greeks  should  have  the  priority  as  lawgiver  forced  the  apologists 
to  some  study  of  comparative  history.  While  in  this  particular 
issue  they  had  a  somewhat  easy  triumph,^  there  was  a  danger,  which"^ 
is  obvious  to  us  now,  in  too  much  reliance  upon  the  chronology 
of  the  Old  Testament,  and  especially  in  placing  an  emphasis  upon 
the  literal  text.  The  trenchant  criticism  of  their  opponents,  there- 
fore, led  the  Fathers  to  adopt  tliat  allegorical  type  of  interpreta- 
tion, which  they  learned  from  the  Greeks  themselves,  and  which  is 

^  One  of  the  earliest  and  best  short  statements  of  this  claim  is  that  made  by  Tatian 
in  his  Address  to  the  Greeks,  Chap.  XXXI  sqq.  It  is  strikingly  in  line  with  Josephus' 
protest  in  Against  Apion. 


288    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

so  useful  wherever  there  is  a  need  for  holding  fast  to  a  text  while 

^  letting  the  meaning  go.     We  shall,  therefore,  find  the  chief  develop- 

Iments  of  Christian  historiography  during  the  first  three  centuries 

Ifollowing  these  two  lines  of  allegory  and  symbolism  on   the  one 

j  'hand  and  of  comparative  chronology  on  the  other. 


CHAPTER  XXV 
ALLEGORY  AND   THE   CONTRIBUTION  OF  ORIGEN 

In  spite  of  what  has  been  said  as  to  the  weakness  of  Christian 
historiography,  it  is  possible  to  maintain  the  thesis  that,  among 
religions,  Christianity  is  especially  notable  as  resting  essentially? 
on  a  historical  basis.  J 

In  so  far  as  Christianity  was  a  historical  religion,  that  was  due, 
as  has  just  been  said,  to  the  Messianic  element  in  it.     Indeed  it  can"] 
be  said  to  have  claimed  from  the  beginning  that  it  was  a  historical 
reHgion  —  a  fulfilment  of  history,  one  fitting  itself  into  the  scheme 
of  social  and  political  evolution  in  a  particular  state.     The  apostleSj 
themselves,  in  their  earliest  appeal,  demanded  that  one  ''search 
the  scriptures"  —  a  demand  unique  in  the  founding  of  religions. 
There  is  a  vast  difference,  however,  between  studying  history  anc 
studying  historically.     That  they  did  study  it,  the  one  fact  that 
the    Christians   retained   the   Old   Testament  is  ample   evidence. 
That  they  failed  to  deal  with  it  adequately,  the  New  Testament 
is  also  ample  evidence.     But  since   the   Christian  Messiah  was  , 
offered  to  the  whole  world  as  well  as  to  the  Jews,  Christian  his^     / 
toriography  had  two  main  tasks  before  it :   it  had  to  place  the  life 
of  Jesus  in  the  history  of  the  Jews,  and,  also,  to  show  its  setting  in 
the  general  history  of  antiquity.    The  latter  problem  was  not  forcedj 
upon  the  Church  until  the  pagan  world  began  to  take  the  new 
religion  seriously,  and  its  answer  is  found  in  the  works  of  the  great 
apologists.     The  relation  of  Christianity  to  Judaism,  however,  the 
Messianic  problem  proper,  was  of  vital  importance  from  the  be- 
ginning, for  it  involved  the  supreme  question  whether  or  not  Jesus 
was  the  one  in  whom  the  prophecies  were  fulfilled.^ 

*  The  coming  of  the  Messiah  was  the  main  continuation  of  Jewish  national  his- 
tory. Messiahship  was  to  the  Jews  of  the  time  of  Christ  the  embodiment  of  somewhat 
the  same  thought  as  stirred  the  Frenchman  of  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  century  at 


290    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

^  One  "searched  the  scriptures,"  therefore,  for  the  evidences  of 
the  signs  by  which  the  advent  could  be  recognized.  The  invitation 
to  search  them  was,  in  appearance  at  least,  a  challenge  to  a  scien- 

itific  test,  that  of  verification.  If  the  data  of  the  life  of  Jesus  cor- 
responded with  the  details  of  the  promises,  there  was  a  proof  that 
the  promises  had  been  fulfilled.  But  since  the  fulfilment  was  not 
literal,  the  interpretation  could  not  be  literal  either.  The  spiritual 
Kingdom  of  the  Messiah  had  to  be  constructed  out  of  fragmentary 
and  uncertain  references,  and  the  only  satisfactory  way  to  apply 
many  of  them  was  by  symbolism  and  allegory.  Modern  critical 
scholarship  has  now  discarded  Messianic  prophecy,  on  the 
basis  that  the  texts  so  confidently  cited  as  foretelling  the 
life  of  Jesus  had  no  such  purpose  in  the  minds  of  their  au- 
thors. But  orthodoxy  has  held,  through  all  the  history  of  the 
church,  that  the  texts  were  applicable  and  that  the  proof  was 
thereby  established  of  the  harmony  of  the  old  and  the  new 
dispensations. 

'  We  cannot  turn,  however,  to  the  problems  of  higher  criticism. 
The  significant  thing  for  history-writing  was  the  creation  of  what 
might  be  called  a  new  genre  —  that  of  the  allegorical  interpretation 

I  of  texts.     The  use  of  allegory  to  explain,  or  explain  away,  texts 

"was  not  a  creation  of  Christian  historians,  for  the  device  was  not 
unknown  to  pagan  literature  or  philosophy.  As  far  back  as  the 
sixth  century  B.C.,  Homer  was  interpreted  allegorically  by  Theagenes 
of  Rhegium,  and  pagan  philosophy  had  constant  recourse  to  alle- 
gory to  harmonize  myth  with  reason.  The  Jews  too  were  past- 
masters  in  its  use.  We  have  seen  how  the  allegorical  interpretation 
of  the  Old  Testament  had  been  developed  by  the  Jewish  scholars, 
especially  those  of  the  Diaspora,  who  found  themselves  thrown 
into  contact  with  gentile  scholars  and  felt  the  need  of  harmonizing 
Greek  thought  with  their  own  intellectual  heritage ;  we  have  seen  to 
what  extent  it  was  carried  in  the  writings  of  the  greatest  Jewish  phi- 

the  recollection  of  1870  and  the  lost  provinces,  or  lent  such  inspiration  in  embittered 
Poland  to  the  prophet-like  poetry  of  Mickiewicz.  It  was  the  dream  of  a  deliverer,  a 
belief  strengthened  rather  than  crushed  by  failure  and  disaster.  The  whole  sad 
drama  of  Jewish  history  may  be  said  to  have  concentrated  its  expression  in  the  Mes- 
sianic hope  —  a  hope  against  hope  itself.  Christianity  in  offering  itself  as  the  reali- 
zation of  that  hope  was  stepping  into  a  definite  place  in  Jewish  history,  but  it  was  a 
place  to  which  the  Jewish  nation  as  a  whole  has  never  admitted  it. 


ALLEGORY  AND   CONTRIBUTION  OF  ORIGEN    291 

losopher  of  antiquity,  Philo  of  Alexandria.^    But  it  is  to  be  found  as 
well  in  the  Old  Testament  itself,  especially  in  the  prophetic  litera- 
ture, where  it  runs  alongside  that  elusive  trace  of  the  unattained 
which  gave  the  prophecies  their  fascinating  charm.     One  could 
trace  it  back  farther  still  to  the  mind  of  primitive  man,  where 
symbol  and  reality  are  often  confused  into  a  single  impression. 
But  in  the  hands  of  the  Christian  theologians,  symbolism  emerged"^ 
from  the  background  of  thought  to  dominate  the  whole  situation. 
The  story  of  realities  depended  upon  the  interpretation  of  the 
unrealities ;   and  that  story  of  realities  was  nothing  short  of  a  his- 
tory of  the  world  itself.  _i 
The  greatest  master  of  Christian  allegory  was  Origen,  the  Alex-T 
andrine   Greek,  who,  in  the  third  century,  contributed  so  much 
to  the  formulation  of  a  scheme  of  theology  for  the  Fathers  of  the 
Church.     Origen  was  a  scholar  as  well  as  a  philosophic  thinkeiy' 
and  it  was  his  work  on  the  text  of  the  Bible,  to  which  reference 
has  been  made  above,  which  won  for  him  the  praise  of  one  so  unlike 
him  in  point  of  view  as  St.  Jerome.     In  that  limited  gallery  of 
illustrious  men  which  St.  Jerome  has  left  for  us,  the  De  Viris  Illus- 
tribus,  Origen  stands  out  clearly  :  ^ 

"  Who  is  there,  he  asks,  who  does  not  know  that  he  was  so  assiduous  in  the 
study  of  Holy  Scriptures,  that  contrary  to  the  spirit  of  his  time,  and  of  his 
people,  he  learned  the  Hebrew  language,  and  taking  the  Septuagint  translation, 
he  gathered  in  a  single  work  the  other  translations  also,  namely  those  of  Aquila 
of  Ponticus  the  Proselyte,  and  Theodotian  the  Ebonite,  and  Symmachus  an 
adherent  of  the  same  sect  who  wrote  commentaries  also  on  the  gospel  according 
to  Matthew,  from  which  he  tried  to  establish  his  doctrine.  And  besides  these, 
a  fifth,  sixth,  and  seventh  translation,  which  we  also  have  from  his  library,  he 
sought  out  with  great  diligence,  and  compared  with  other  editions.  And  since 
I  have  given  a  list  of  his  works  in  the  volumes  of  letters  which  I  have  written 

1  The  influence  of  Philo  upon  the  Christian  Fathers  is  a  matter  of  great  interest. 
The  admiration  of  speculative  minds  for  the  Jewish  thinker  is  echoed  in  the  com- 
ment which  Eusebius  prefixes  to  his  list  of  the  works  of  Philo  {Historia  Eccksiastica, 
Bk.  II,  Chap.  XVIII)  :  "  Copious  in  language,  comprehensive  in  thought,  sublime  and 
elevated  in  his  views  of  divine  Scripture,  Philo  has  produced  manifold  and  various 
expositions  of  the  sacred  books."  (A.  C.  McGiffert's  translation  in  the  Library  of 
Niccne  and  Post-Niccnc  Fathers.) 

2  Jerome,  De  Viris  Illustrihus,  Chap.  LTV.  Also  in  the  preface  of  his  Dc  Nominibtis 
Hebraicis,  Jerome  speaks  of  him  as,  "Origen,  whom  all  but  the  ignorant  acknowledge 
as  the  greatest  teacher  of  the  churches,  next  to  the  Apostles." 


292    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

to  Paula,  in  a  letter  which  I  wrote  against  the  works  of  Varro,  I  pass  this  by 
now,  not  failing,  however,  to  make  mention  of  his  immortal  genius,  how  that 
he  understood  dialectics,  as  well  as  geometry,  arithmetic,  music,  grammar,  and 
rhetoric,  and  taught  all  the  schools  of  philosophers,  in  such  wise  that  he  had  also 
dUigent  students  in  secular  literature,  and  lectured  to  them  daily,  and  the 
crowds  which  flocked  to  him  were  marvellous.  These,  he  received  in  the  hope 
that  through  the  instrumentahty  of  this  secular  literature,  he  might  establish 
them  in  the  faith  of  Christ." 

This  tribute  by  Jerome  summarizes  the  lengthy  account  of 
Origen  by  Eusebius  in  the  sixth  book  of  the  Ecclesiastical  History 
to  which  we  may  still  turn  for  a  full  account  of  the  life  and  influence 
of  one  who,  while  not  a  historian  in  the  stricter  sense,  contributed 
to  Christian  historiography  one  of  its  most  remarkable  chapters. 
'  Origen  was  as  courageous  in  his  interpretations  as  he  was 
thorough  in  his  scholarship.  He  not  only  denied  the  literal  truth 
of  much  of  Genesis,  and  explained  away  the  darker  happenings 
in  the  history  of  Israel ;  but,  even  in  the  New  Testament,  he  treated 
as  parables  or  fables  such  stories  as  that  of  the  Devil  taking  Jesus 
up  into  a  high  mountain  and  showing  him  the  kingdoms  of  the 
iworld.  One  reads  Origen  with  a  startle  of  surprise.  The  most 
learned  of  the  Fathers  of  the  third  century  was  a  modern.^  His 
commentaries  upon  the  Bible  might  almost  pass  for  the  product  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  The  age  of  Lyell  and  Darwin  has  seen 
the  same  effort  of  mystic  orthodoxy  to  save  the  poem  of  Creation, 
by  making  the  six  days  over  into  geological  eras  and  the  story  of 
Adam  and  Eve  a  symbol  of  human  fate.  Many  a  sermon  upon  the 
reconciliation  of  science  and  religion  —  that  supreme  subject  of 
modern  sermons  —  might  be  taken  almost  bodily  from  Origen. 
For  his  problem  was  essentially  like  that  which  fronts  the  modern 
theologian ;  he  had  to  win  from  a  rationalism  which  he  respected, 
the  denial  of  its  inherent  skepticism.  Like  Philo,  a  resident  of  that 
cosmopoHtan  centre,  Alexandria,  that  meeting-place  of  races  and 
religions,  Origen  was  a  modern  among  moderns.  He  was  a  Greek 
of  subtlest  intellect  and  vast  erudition,  one  of  the  finest  products 
of  the  great  Hellenic  dispersion.^ 

Interpretation  of  the  scriptures  by  allegory  is  not,  in  Origen's 

1  Too  modern  to  be  entirely  orthodox.    Hence  his  subsequent  eclipse. 
*  Cf.  Eusebius,  Historia  Ecclesiastica,  Bk.  VI,  for  details  of  Origen's  life. 


ALLEGORY  AND   CONTRIBUTION  OF  ORIGEN    293 

eyes,  an  unwarranted  liberty.  The  scriptures  themselves  sanction 
it  —  allegorically !  There  is  a  ''hidden  and  secret  meaning,"  he 
says,  ''in  each  individual  word,  the  treasure  of  divine  wisdom  being 
hid  in  the  vulgar  and  unpolished  vessels  of  words ;  as  the  apostle 
also  points  out  when  he  says,  'We  have  this  treasure  in  earthen 
vessels.'  "  ^  Quaintly  naive  as  such  reasoning  seems  when  based 
upon  a  single  text,  its  weakness  becomes  its  strength  when  sufficient 
texts  are  adduced  to  convey  the  impression  that  the  scriptures 
themselves  do  really  proclaim  their  own  symbolic  character.  This 
Origen  endeavors  to  do.  "If  the  law  of  Moses  had  contained 
nothing  which  was  to  be  understood  as  having  a  secret  meaning, 
the  prophet  would  not  have  said  in  his  prayer  to  God :  '  Open  thou 
mine  eyes  and  I  will  behold  wondrous  things  out  of  thy  law ' "  (Psalms 
119^^).  What,  he  asks,  can  one  make  out  of  the  prophecy  of 
Ezekiel  except  allegorically  ?  -  Prophetic  literature  implies  alle- 
gory in  its  very  structure.  But  the  strongest  proof  of  the  legiti- 
macy of  allegorical  interpretation  is  its  use  in  the  New  Testament, 
and  so  largely  by  St.  Paul.^ 

The  modern  critic  sees  the  vicious  circle  in  which  such  reason- 
ing moves.  But  he  sees  it  because  he  denies  the  hidden  meaning, 
the  secret  lore,  which  to  the  "intellectuals"  of  the  third  century 
was  the  real  heart  of  phenomena.  Symbolism  has  deeper  roots 
than  one  suspects.  The  mysterious  efficacy  of  numbers  is  as  wide 
as  savagery ;  the  secret  value  of  words  is  a  doctrine  as  universal  as 
speech.  They  come  from  untold  ages  beyond  Pythagoras  or  Hera- 
cleitus.  The  Christian  emphasis  upon  the  logos — "the  word 
which  became  God  and  the  word  which  was  God"  —  but  put  the 
stamp  of  supreme  authority  upon  a  phase  of  thought  intelligible 
to  all  antiquity.  Gnosticism  took  hold  of  that  phase,  and  by 
insisting  upon  an  inner  doctrine  which  was  concealed  from  the 
uninitiated,  attempted  to  harmonize  Christianity  with  the  parallel 
cults  of  paganism.  Neo-platonism  was  doing  much  the  same  for 
paganism  itself.  The  cults  of  Asia  and  Egypt  were  drawn  to- 
gether and  interpreted  in  the  light  of  the  worship  of  Demeter  or 
Dionysus.     Origen's  point  of  view  is  not  so  naive  as  it  seems.     It 

*  Origen,  De  Principiis,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  I,  Sect.  7. 

*  Origen,  Contra  Celstim,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  L. 
« Ibid.,  Bk.  IV,  Chap.  XLIX. 


294    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

was  in  line  with  that  of  his  age.  The  world  was  becoming  one,  and 
yet  at  the  same  time  it  was  a  medley  of  different  and  divergent 
civilizations.  The  only  way  the  ancient  could  think  of  overcoming 
this  antithesis  between  an  ideal  which  sought  for  unity  and  phenom- 
ena which  differed  was  by  denying  the  essential  nature  of  the  differ- 
ences. We  should  do  the  same  if  it  were  not  for  our  hypothesis  of 
evolution  and  the  historical  attitude  of  mind.  Only  when  one  sees  the 
impasse  into  which  the  thinkers  of  antiquity  were  forced,  in  their 
attempts  to  syncretize  a  complex  and  varying  world,  does  one 
realize  by  contrast  what  a  tremendous  implement  of  synthesis  the 
evolutionary  hypothesis  supplies.  The  only  alternative  method 
by  which  to  realize  the  harmony  which  does  not  appear  is  by  sym- 
bolism. 

If  we  once  grant  that  texts  are  not  what  they  seem,  there  is 
only  one  way  to  learn  their  true  meaning.  We  must  find  a  key,  and 
that  key  must  be  some  supreme  fact,  some  fact  so  large  that  the 
content  of  the  text  seems  but  incidental  to  it.  Christianity  sup- 
plied such  a  clue  to  the  interpretation  of  the  Old  Testament ;  and 
the  Old  Testament,  upon  its  side,  supplied  Christianity  with  the 
authority  of  a  long  antiquity.  The  value  of  that  antiquity  for  the 
basis  of  a  story  of  obscure,  recent  happenings  in  Jerusalem  was 
felt  by  all  apologists,  and  has  been  a  convincing  argument  until  the 
present.  It  was  left  for  the  nineteenth  century  to  substitute  for 
symbolism  the  tests  of  historical  criticism,  and  thus  to  see  the 
whole  scheme  of  allegorical  theological  interpretation  fade  away. 
'But  we  should  not  forget  that,  false  as  it  seems  to  us  in  both  method 
and  results,  the  symbolic  method  made  the  theologian  somewhat 
of  a  historian  in  spite  of  himself ;  and  we  should  not  expect  of  the 
savant  of  the  third  century  the  historical  and  evolutionary  attitude 
of  today  —  which  was,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  his  only  alternative. 

Symbolism  may  twist  the  texts ;  but  a  mind  like  Origen's  does 
not  miss  the  essential  point  that  the  texts  must  be  there  to  twist. 
Nothing  is  more  interesting  in  the  historiography  of  early  Chris- 
tianity than  to  see  how  Origen  came  to  realize,  after  all,  the  paucity 
of  his  sources  and  their  inadequacy,  particularly  those  dealing  with 
the  history  of  Christianity  itself.  He  shows  this  with  scholarly 
frankness  in  a  passage  in  his  famous  apology.  Against  Celsus.  Celsus 
was  a  pagan  Greek  who  wrote  the  most  notable  attack  upon  Chris- 


ALLEGORY  AND   CONTRIBUTION  OF  ORIGEN    295 

tianity  of  which  we  have  record  from  those  early  times.  His 
treatise  was  a  powerful  and  learned  criticism  of  the  Christian 
writings  and  teachings,  especially  emphasizing  their  unscientific 
character  and  the  credulity  of  those  who  believed  in  them.  Origen's 
reply  reveals  in  more  places  than  one  how  in  him  a  genuine  his- 
torical critic  was  lost  in  the  theologian.  To  illustrate  :  Celsus  had 
claimed  that  before  writing  his  attack  he  had  taken  the  trouble  to 
acquaint  himself  with  all  the  Christian  doctrines  and  writings. 
Origen,  drawing  on  his  prodigious  knowledge  of  the  Bible,  shows 
time  and  again  what  a  superficial  acquaintance  it  had  been  —  that 
is,  judged  according  to  Origen's  method  of  interpretation.  But 
when  Celsus  charges  the  Christians  with  obscurantism,  stating  that 
their  teachers  generally  tell  him  not  to  investigate,  while  at  the 
same  time  exhorting  him  to  believe,  Origen  takes  another  tack.^ 
He  is  apparently  a  little  ashamed  of  the  emphasis  taken  from 
reason  and  placed  upon  faith  by  his  Christian  colleagues.  He  does 
not  actually  say  as  much,  but  he  reminds  Celsus  that  all  men  have 
not  the  leisure  to  investigate.  After  this  weak  admission,  how- 
ever, he  turns  round,  in  what  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  passages 
of  patristic  writing,  and  demands  if  Celsus  and  the  pagans  do  not 
follow  authority  as  well.  Have  not  Stoics  and  Platonists  a  teacher 
too,  whose  word  they  go  back  to?  Celsus  beheves  in  an  uncreated 
world  and  that  the  flood  (Deucalion's)  is  a  fairly  modern  thing.^ 
But  what  authority  has  he  ?  The  dialogues  of  Plato  ?  But  Moses 
saw  more  clearly  than  Plato.  He  was  in  incomparably  better 
position  to  be  informed.  Why  not  prefer  the  account  of  Moses? 
The  value  of  a  controversy  is  that  each  side  sees  the  other's 
weak  points.  It  seldom  results  in  admitting  the  inferiority  of 
one's  own  position ;  but  once  in  a  while  a  fair-minded  man  will  be 
courageous  enough  to  state  that,  through  no  fault  of  his  own,  he  is 
unable  to  be  more  accurate  than  his  opponent.  This  is  about  what 
Origen  does,  in  taking  up  the  charge  of  Celsus  that  the  narrative 
of  the  baptism  in  the  Jordan  is  so  improbable  a  story  as  to  require 

^  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chaps.  XII  and  X.  The  order  of  citations  has  been  reversed 
here  for  clarity. 

2  Celsus  also  had  the  idea  of  a  common  evolution  of  ideas  and  customs  and  of 
the  borrowings  of  one  nation  from  another,  e.g.,  circumcision  from  Egypt,  ibid.,  Bk.  I, 
Chap.  XXII. 


296    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

confirmation  of  first-hand  witnesses,  before  he  as  a  thinking  pagan 
3^  ^could  accept  it.  In  reply  Origen  frankly  admits  the  paucity  of 
sources  for  the  history  of  Christianity;  but  demands  to  know  if 
Celsus  is  willing  to  give  up  pagan  history  because  it  contains  im- 
probable incidents.  The  passage  is  worth  quoting,  for  it  shows  how 
the  most  learned  of  all  the  Fathers,  the  most  subtle  and  compre- 
hensive intellect,  with  one  exception,  which  Christianity  enlisted  to 
its  cause,  recognized  the  weakness  of  Christian  historiography  but 
[Jailed  to  see  how  it  could  be  remedied  : 

"  Before  we  begin  our  reply  we  have  to  remark  that  the  endeavour  to  show 
with  regard  to  almost  any  history,  however  true,  that  it  actually  occurred,  and 
to  produce  an  intelligent  conception  regarding  it,  is  one  of  the  most  difficult 
undertakings  that  can  be  attempted,  and  is  in  some  instances  an  impossibility. 
For  suppose  that  some  one  were  to  assert  that  there  never  had  been  any  Trojan 
War,  chiefly  on  account  of  the  impossible  narrative  interwoven  therewith,  about 
a  certain  Achilles  being  the  son  of  a  sea-goddess  Thetis  and  of  a  man  Peleus, 
or  Sarpedon  being  the  son  of  Zeus,  or  Ascalaphus  and  lalmenus  the  sons  of  Ares, 
or  iEneas  that  of  Aphrodite,  how  should  we  prove  that  such  was  the  case,  espe- 
cially under  the  weight  of  the  fiction  attached,  I  know  not  how,  to  the  univer- 
sally prevalent  opinion  that  there  was  really  a  war  in  Ilium  between  Greeks  and 
Trojans  ?  And  suppose,  also,  that  some  one  disbelieved  the  story  of  (Edipus  and 
Jocasta,  and  of  their  two  sons  Eteocles  and  Polynices,  because  the  sphinx,  a  kind 
of  half-virgin,  was  introduced  into  the  narrative,  how  should  we  demonstrate  the 
reality  of  such  a  thing  ?  And  in  like  manner  also  with  the  history  of  the  Epi- 
goni,  although  there  is  no  such  marvellous  event  interwoven  with  it,  or  with  the 
return  of  the  Heracleidae,  or  countless  other  historical  events.  But  he  who  deals 
candidly  with  histories,  and  would  wish  to  keep  himself  also  from  being  imposed 
upon  by  them,  will  exercise  his  judgment  as  to  what  statements  he  will  give  his 
assent  to,  and  what  he  will  accept  figuratively,  seeking  to  discover  the  meaning 
of  the  authors  of  such  inventions,  and  from  what  statements  he  will  withhold  his 
belief,  as  having  been  written  for  the  gratification  of  certain  individuals.  And 
we  have  said  this  by  way  of  anticipation  respecting  the  whole  history  related 
in  the  Gospels  concerning  Jesus,  not  as  inviting  men  of  acuteness  to  a  simple 
and  unreasoning  faith,  but  wishing  to  show  that  there  is  need  of  candour  in 
those  who  are  to  read,  and  of  much  investigation,  and,  so  to  speak,  of  insight 
into  the  meaning  of  the  writers,  that  the  object  with  which  each  event  has  been 
recorded  may  be  discovered."  ^ 

In  so  many  words  Origen  admits  that  since  the  sources  for 
Christian  history  cannot  be  checked  up  by  external  evidence,  there 

'  Ibid.,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XLII.  (F.  Crombie's  translation  in  the  Ank-Nicene  Chris- 
tian Library.) 


ALLEGORY  AND   CONTRIBUTION  OF  ORIGEN    297 

is  nothing  left  but  to  accept  their  main  outHnes  on  faith  —  the  same 
faith  the  Greek  has  in  the  existence  of  Troy  or  the  Roman  in  the  early 
kings .  B  ut  being  a  Greek — and  above  all  a  Greek  in  argument  —  he 
qualifies  his  faith  by  reason  and  explains  away  what  seems  improb- 
able. In  a  way,  therefore,  we  have  before  us  a  sort  of  sophisticated 
Herodotus  after  all,  who  eliminates  myth  to  suit  his  perspectivejj 

1  In  addition  to  Celsus,  Porphyry  entered  the  lists  against  Origen  from  the  pagan 
side.  Of  his  attack,  the  following  extract,  quoted,  with  cautionary  comment,  by 
Eusebius  in  the  sixth  book  (Chap.  XIX)  of  the  Historia  Ecclesiastica  (A.  C.  McGiffert's 
translation),  is  worth  repeating  as  an  indication  of  the  controversial  atmosphere  in 
which  we  are  here  moving : 

'"  Some  persons  [says  Porphyry],  desiring  to  find  a  solution  of  the  baseness  of 
the  Jewish  Scriptures  rather  than  abandon  them,  have  had  recourse  to  explanations 
inconsistent  and  incongruous  with  the  words  written,  which  explanations,  instead 
of  supplying  a  defense  of  the  foreigners,  contain  rather  approval  and  praise  of  them- 
selves. For  they  boast  that  the  plain  words  of  Moses  are  enigmas,  and  regard  them 
as  oracles  full  of  hidden  mysteries;  and  having  bewildered  the  mental  judgment  by 
folly,  they  make  their  explanations.'  Farther  on  he  says:  'As  an  example  of  this 
absurdity  take  a  man  whom  I  met  when  I  was  young,  and  who  was  then  greatly  cele- 
brated and  still  is,  on  account  of  the  writings  which  he  has  left.  I  refer  to  Origen, 
who  is  highly  honoured  by  the  teachers  of  these  doctrines.  For  this  man,  having 
been  a  hearer  of  Ammonius,  who  had  attained  the  greatest  proficiency  in  philosophy 
of  any  in  our  day,  derived  much  benefit  from  his  teacher  in  the  knowledge  of  the 
sciences ;  but  as  to  the  correct  choice  of  life,  he  pursued  a  course  opposite  to  his.  For 
Ammonius,  being  a  Christian,  and  brought  up  by  Christian  parents,  when  he  gave 
himself  to  study  and  to  philosophy  straightway  conformed  to  the  life  required  by  the 
laws.  But  Origen,  having  been  educated  as  a  Greek  in  Greek  literature,  went  over  to 
the  barbarian  recklessness.  And  carrying  over  the  learning  which  he  had  obtained, 
he  hawked  it  about,  in  his  life  conducting  himself  as  a  Christian  and  contrary  to  the 
laws,  but  in  his  opinions  of  material  things  and  of  the  Deity  being  like  a  Greek,  and 
mingling  Grecian  teachings  with  foreign  fables.  For  he  was  continually  studying 
Plato,  and  he  busied  himself  with  the  writings  of  Numenius  and  Cronius,  ApoUophanes, 
Longinus,  Moderatus,  and  Nicomachus,  and  those  famous  among  the  Pythagoreans. 
And  he  used  the  books  of  Chaeremon  the  Stoic,  and  of  Cornutus.  Becoming  ac- 
quainted through  them  with  the  figurative  interpretation  of  the  Grecian  mysteries,  he 
applied  it  to  the  Jewish  Scriptures.' 

"These  things  are  said  by  Porphyry  in  the  third  book  of  his  work  against  the 
Christians.  He  speaks  truly  of  the  industry  and  learning  of  the  man,  but  plainly 
utters  a  falsehood  (for  what  will  not  an  opposer  of  Christians  do  ?)  when  he  says  that 
he  went  over  from  the  Greeks,  and  that  Ammonius  fell  from  a  life  of  piety  into  heathen 
customs.  For  the  doctrine  of  Christ  was  taught  to  Origen  by  his  parents,  as  we  have 
shown  above.  And  Ammonius  held  the  divine  philosophy  unshaken  and  unadul- 
terated to  the  end  of  his  life.  His  works  yet  extant  show  this,  as  he  is  celebrated 
among  many  for  the  writings  which  he  has  left.  For  example,  the  work  entitled  'The 
Harmony  of  Moses  and  Jesus, '  and  such  others  as  are  in  the  possession  of  the  learned. 
These  things  are  sufficient  to  evince  the  slander  of  the  false  accuser,  and  also  the  pro- 
ficiency of  Origen  in  Grecian  learning." 


298    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Had  the  Christian  world  been  and  remained  as  sophisticated 
as  Origen,  the  conception  of  biblical  history  for  the  next  fifteen 

'hundred  years  would  have  been  vastly  different.  But,  although 
the  allegorical  method  of  biblical  interpretation  was  used  by  nearly 
all  the  Fathers  —  by  none  more  than  by  the  pope  whose  influence 
sank  deepest  into  the  Middle  Ages,  Gregory  the  Great  —  and  still 
forms  the  subject  of  most  sermons,  the  symbolism  and  allegory 
came  to  be  applied  less  to  those  passages  which  contained  the  narra- 
tive, than  to  the  moralizing  and  prophetic  sections.  The  stories  of 
the  Creation,  of  the  Flood,  of  Joseph,  of  the  plagues  in  Egypt,  of 
Sodom  and  Gomorrah,  were  not  explained  away.  But  about  them, 
and  the  rest  of  that  high  theme  of  the  fortunes  of  Israel,  were  woven 
the  gorgeous  dreams  of  every  poetic  imagination  from  Origen  to 
Bossuet  which  had  been  steeped  in  miracle  and  rested  upon  au- 
thority. One  turns  to  Sulpicius  Severus,  the  biographer  of  the 
wonder-working  Martin  of  Tours,  for  the  Bible  story  as  it  reached 

'the  Middle  Ages.  The  narrative  of  the  Old  Testament  was  taken 
literally,  like  that  of  the  New ;  the  story  of  a  primitive  people  was 
presented  to  a  primitive  audience.  Allegory  was  not  allowed  to 
explain  away  passages  which  would  have  shocked  the  critical  intel- 
ligence of  Hellenic  philosophers,  for  those  were  the  very  passages 
most  likely  to  impress  the  simple-minded  Germans  for  whose  edu- 

\^cation  the  church  itself  was  to  be  responsible. 

p  There  was,  however,  a  better  reason  than  mere  credulous 
X     simplicity  why  Jewish  and  Christian  history  were  not  allegorized 

laway.     It  was  because  that  history  had  been  made  credible  by  an 

[exhaustive  treatment  of  chronology.  Christian  scholars  took  up 
the  task  of  reconciling  the  events  of  Jewish  history  with  the  annals 
of  other  histories,  and  worked  into  a  convincing  and  definite  scheme 
of  parallel  chronology  the  narrative  from  Abraham  to  Christ. 
Mathematics  was  applied  to  history  —  not  simply  to  the  biblical 
narrative  but  all  that  of  the  ancient  world  —  and  out  of  the  chaos 
of  fact  and  legend,  of  contradiction  and  absurdity,  of  fancy  run  riot 
and  unfounded  speculation,  there  was  slowly  hammered  into  shape 
that  scheme  of  measured  years  back  to  the  origins  of  Israel  and  then 
to  the  Creation,  which  still  largely  prevails  today.  This  is  one  of 
the  most  important  things  ever  done  by  historians.  Henceforth, 
for  the  next  fifteen  centuries  and  more,  there  was  one  sure  path 


ALLEGORY  AND   CONTRIBUTION  OF  ORIGEN    299 

back  to  the  origin  of  the  world,  a  path  along  the  Jewish  past, 
marked  out  by  the  absolute  laws  of  mathematics  and  revelation.; 
An  account  of  how  this  came  about  will  carry  us  back  into  that 
complicated  problem  of  the  measurement  of  time,  which  we  have 
considered  before,  in  its  general  aspects.  Now,  however,  we  come 
upon  the  work  of  those  who  gave  us  our  own  time-reckoning,  and 
who  in  doing  so  moulded  the  conception  of  world  history  for  the 
western  world  more,  perhaps,  than  any  other  students  or  masters 
of  history. 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY;    EUSEBIUS 

The  history  of  History  repeats  itself.  Tradition  and  myth,  epic 
and  genealogy,  priestly  lore  of  world  eras  and  the  marking  of  time, 
criticism  and  history  follow  each  other  or  fuse  in  the  long  evolution 
of  that  rational  self-consciousness  which  projects  itself  into  the  past 
as  it  builds  up  the  synthesis  of  the  present.  Similar  pathways 
lie  behind  all  developed  historiographies.  Indeed,  the  parallel 
between  the  histories  of  the  History  of  different  nations  is  so  close 
as  to  rob  the  successive  chapters  of  much  of  the  charm  of  novelty. 
When  we  have  reviewed  the  historiography  of  Greece,  that  of 
Rome  strikes  us  as  familiar.  The  same  likeness  lies  already  in 
the  less  developed  historiographies  of  Oriental  cultures.  They  all 
emerge  from  a  common  base ;  and,  to  use  a  biological  expression, 
ontogeny  repeats  phylogeny  —  the  individual  repeats  the  species. 
The  law  of  growth  seems  to  apply  to  history  as  though  it  were  an 
organism  with  an  independent  evolution,  instead  of  what  it  really 
is,  a  mere  reflection  of  changing  societies. 

The  explanation  apparently  lies  at  hand,  in  the  similar  evolution 
of  the  societies  which  produce  the  history.  But,  from  such  premises 
one  would  hardly  expect  the  historiography  of  a  religion  to  exhibit 
the  same  general  lines  of  development.  Yet  in  the  history  of  Chris- 
tian History  we  have  much  the  same  evolution  of  material  as  in  that 
of  Greece  or  Rome.  Naturally,  the  priestly  element  is  stronger,  and 
the  attempts  at  rationahzing  the  narratives  more  in  evidence.  But 
it  is  the  absence  rather  than  the  presence  of  sophistication  which 
rstrikes  one  most.  The  genealogies  play  their  role  for  the  kingdom 
of  the  Messiah  as  for  the  cities  of  Hellas,^  Hesiods  of  Jewish  and 
Christian  theology  present  their  schemes  of  divinely  appointed  eras, 

*  C/.  Julius  Africanus'  pioneer  work  in  this  direction,  in  harmonizing  the  variant 
genealogies  of  Christ  in  the  Gospel,  quoted  by  Eusebius,  Hisioria  Ecclesiastica,  Bk.  I, 
Chap.  VII. 

300 


CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY  301 

and  through  the  whole  heroic  period  of  the  Church,  legends  of  saints"! 
and  martyrs  furnish  the  unending  epic  of  the  unending  war,  where 
the  hosts  of  heaven  fought  with  men,  not  for  a  vanished  Troy  but 
for  an  eternal  city.  Finally,  the  work  of  Christian  logographers  in 
the  apologists — and  every  theologian  was  an  apologist — reduced  the 
scheme  to  prose.  The  parallel  would  not  hold,  however,  beyond  the 
merest  externals  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  development  of  Christian 
chronology ;  for  the  thought  of  writing  history  was  but  Httle  in  the 
minds  of  theologians,  and  hardly  more  in  those  of  martyrologists. 
From  the  apologists,  face  to  face  with  the  criticism  of  the  unbeliev- 
ing world,  came  the  demand  for  more  rigid  methods  of  comparative 
chronology,  by  which  they  could  prove  the  real  antiquity  and  direct 
descent  of  Christianity.  The  same  kind  of  practical  need  had  pro- 
duced similar,  if  more  trivial,  documentation  by  pagan  priests  and 
was  later  to  repeat  itself  in  mediaeval  monasteries.  So  that  in  the 
Christian  Church,  as  in  the  antique  world  generally,  history  proper  j 
was  born  of  the  appHcation  of  research  and  chronology  to  meet  the 
exacting  demands  of  skepticism,  as  well  as  of  the  desire  to  set  forth 
great  deeds.  ! 

The  path  to  Christian  historiography  lies,  therefore,  through  a 
study  of  Christian  chronology.  The  basis  for  this  was  the  work 
of  the  Jewish  scholars  of  the  Diaspora.  When  the  Christian  apolojj 
gists  of  the  second  and  third  centuries  attempted  to  synchronize  the 
Old  Testament  history  with  that  of  the  gentiles,  they  could  fall  back 
upon  the  work  of  a  Jewish  scribe,  Justus  of  Tiberius,  who  wrote  in 
the  reign  of  Hadrian.^  He  prepared  a  chronicle  of  Jewish  kings, 
working  along  the  same  uncertain  basis  of  ''generations"  as  had 
been  used  in  gentile  chronicles,  and  so  claiming  for  Moses  an  an- 
tiquity greater  than  that  of  the  oldest  figures  in  Greek  legend.  The 
difficulties  in  the  way  of  any  counter  proof  lent  this  statement  great 
value  in  argument,  especially  since  it  was  merely  a  mathematical 
formulation  of  a  belief  already  established  in  the  Church.  But,^ 
although  the  argument  of  priority  was  familiar  from  early  days, 
the  first  formally  prepared  Christian  chronology  did  not  appear 
until  the  middle  of  the  third  century  when  Julius  Africanus  wrote 
his  Chronographia.     It  was  a  work  in  five  books,  drawing  upon  the  • 

'  The  connection   of  Christian  chronology  with  that  of   the  Greeks,  e.g.  Castor, 
has  been  referred  to  above.    Vide  Eusebius,  Chronicorum  Liber  Primus. 


302    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

writings  of  Josephus,  Manetho  and  pagan  scholars,  and  arranging 
the  eras  of  the  old  dispensation  in  a  series  symbolical  of  creation 
itself.  The  duration  of  the  world  is  to  reach  six  thousand  years,  after 
which  is  to  come  a  thousand-year  Sabbath.  The  birth  of  Christ  is 
put  five  thousand  five  hundred  years  from  Adam,  which  leaves  five 
hundred  more  before  the  end.  Halfway  along  this  stretch  of  cen- 
turies, three  thousand  years  from  the  creation,  we  come  upon  the 
death  of  Palek,  under  whom  the  world  was  parcelled  out,  as  is 
recorded  in  the  twenty-fifth  chapter  of  Genesis.^ 

^  A  scheme  Hke  this  is  a  chronology  only  by  courtesy ;  and  yet  a 
glance  at  the  dating  along  the  pages  of  the  authorized  edition  of  the 
Bible  will  show  how  relatively  close  to  it  has  been  the  accepted 
dating  of  the  world's  history  down  to  our  own  time.  Critically  con- 
sidered, it  was  merely  a  variation  of  the  symboHsm  of  Origen  —  an 
allegory  of  the  general  scheme  of  history  instead  of  an  allegory  of 
details.  It  was  symboHsm  on  a  bolder  and  larger  scale,  all  the  more 
convincing  because,  while  it  supplied  the  framework  for  events  it  did 
not  have  to  harmonize  or  explain  them  away.  Three  main  influ- 
ences made  for  its  success.  The  absence  of  any  continuous  Jewish 
chronology  offered  it  open  field ;  theology  demanded  that  the  world's 
history  should  centre  upon  the  life  of  Christ  and  the  coming  of  the 
Jdngdom ;  and  the  idea  of  world  eras  was  just  in  line  with  the  ideas 
of  pagan  savants  who  had  attained  a  rude  conception  of  natural  law 

lin  the  movement  of  history.  A  treatment  of  history  which  could 
appeal  to  the  great  name  of  Varro  for  its  pagan  counterpart  was 
not  lightly  to  be  rejected.  The  best  minds  of  antiquity  saw  — 
though  dimly  —  the  outer  world  as  a  reflection  of  the  human  reason ; 
but  what  Platonic  idea  ever  mastered  recalcitrant  phenomena  so 
beautifully  as  this  scheme  of  Christian  history  with  its  symmetry 
estabhshed  by  a  divine  mathematics? 

One  is  tempted  to  turn  aside  to  the  absorbing  problems  of  phi- 
losophy which  these  crude  solutions  of  world  history  open  up.  But 
before  us  stands  a  great  figure,  a  Herodotus  among  the  logographers 

fof  the  early  Church.  Eusebius  of  Caesarea,  the  Father  of  Church 
History,  worked  out  from  materials  Hke  these  the  chronology  of  the 
world  which  was  to  be  substantially  that  of  all  the  subsequent  his- 

^  See  the  monumental  study  of  H.  Gelzer,  Sextus  Julius  Africanus    .   .   .  ,  which 
has  disentangled  the  fragile  threads  of  his  chronology  as  preserved  in  various  ways. 


CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY  303 

tory  of  Europe  to  our  own  time,  and  preserved  the  precious  frag- 
ments of  his  predecessors  in  the  first  history  of  Christianity.^ 

Eusebius  meets  the  two  qualifications  which  Polybius  prescribed 
as  indispensable  for  the  historian.  He  was  a  man  of  affairs,  of  wide 
knowledge  of  the  world,  and  held  high  ofiice  in  the  state  whose 
fortunes  he  described.  He  it  was  who  at  the  great  council  of  Nicaea 
(325  A.D.)  sat  at  the  right  hand  of  Constantine  and  delivered  the 
opening  oration  in  honor  of  the  emperor.^  Few  historians  of  either 
church  or  state  have  ever  had  more  spectacular  tribute  paid  to  their 
learning  and  judicial  temper.  For  it  was  apparently  these  two 
quaHties  which  especially  equipped  Eusebius  for  so  distinguished  an 
honor.  At  least  one  Ukes  to  think  so  ;  but  perhaps  the  distinction 
fell  to  him  because  he  was  as  well  an  accomphshed  courtier  and  as 
much  the  apologist  of  Constantine  as  of  the  Christian  faith. 

This  incident  fixes  for  us  the  fife  of  Eusebius.  Born  about  260 
A.D.,  he  was  at  the  fulness  of  his  powers  when  the  Church  gained  its 
freedom,  and  he  lived  on  until  339  or  340.  He  had  studied  in  the 
learned  circle  of  Pamphilus  of  Caesarea,  whose  great  library  was  to 
furnish  him  with  many  of  his  materials,^  and  there  came  under  the 
spell  of  Origen,  whose  influence  was  supreme  in  the  circle  of 
Pamphilus.  Nothing  is  more  difficult  in  criticism  than  the  estimate 
of  one  man's  influence  upon  another  —  and  nothing  more  light- 
heartedly  hazarded.  It  would  be  hard  to  say  what  Eusebius  would 
have  been  without  the  works  of  Origen  to  inspire  him,  but  that  they 
did  influence  him  is  beyond  question.  Eusebius  was  not  an  original 
thinker.  He  lacked  the  boldness  of  genius  ;  but  to  witness  that  bold- 
ness in  Origen  must  have  been  an  inspiration  toward  freedom  from 
ecclesiasticism  and  traditionalism.^     His  history  is  no  mere  bishop's 

'  The  name  Eusebius  was  a  very  common  one  in  the  records  of  the  early  Church. 
There  are  forty  Eusebiuses,  contemporaries  of  the  historian,  noted  in  Smith  and  Wace's 
Dictionary  of  Ckristian  Biography,  and,  in  all,  one  hundred  thirty-seven  from  the  first 
eight  centuries.  Eusebius  of  Csesarea  took  the  surname  Pamphilus  after  the  death 
of  his  master  Pamphilus,  out  of  respect  for  him. 

2  Cf.  Sozomen,  Historia  Ecclesiastica,  Bic.  I,  Chap.  XIX. 

3  Cj.  Eusebius,  De  Martyribus  Palaslinae,  Chap.  IV ;  Jerome,  De  Viris  lUustribus, 
Chaps.  LXXV,  LXXXI. 

^  These  at  least  are  the  two  main  influences  of  Origen  upon  Eusebius  according 
to  McGiffert  and  Heinrici.  See  A.  C.McGifTert's  edition  of  the  Church  History,  p.  7, 
and  C.  F.  G.  Heinrici,  Das  Urchristentum  in  der  Kirchengeschichte  des  Eusebius 
(1894).     Heinrici  here  presents  the  case  against  F.  Overbeck's  view  {tfber  dieAnJange 


304    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

history,  it  is  the  record  of  a  rehgion  as  well  as  of  a  church.  Its 
scholarship  is  critical,  not  credulous.  From  Origen,  too,  may  have 
come  the  general  conception  which  makes  the  first  church  history  a 
chapter  in  the  working  out  of  a  vast  world-scheme,  the  "economy" 
of  God.^  But  the  time  had  now  come  for  such  a  conception  to  be 
commonplace.  It  was  no  longer  a  speculation ;  the  recognition  by 
jthe  empire  was  making  it  a  fact. 

If  one  were  to  search  for  influences  moulding  the  character 
of  Eusebius'  history  this  triumph  of  the  Church  would  necessarily 
come  first.  No  history  of  Christianity  worthy  of  the  name  could 
well  appear  during  the  era  of  persecutions.  Not  that  the  persecu- 
tions were  so  severe  or  so  continuous  as  has  been  commonly  beheved. 
Eusebius  himself,  for  instance,  lived  safely  through  the  most  severe 
persecution,  and  visiting  Pamphilus  in  prison  —  for  Pamphilus  suf- 
fered martyrdom — carried  on  his  theological  works  in  personal  touch 
with  his  master.  But  though  the  persecutions  have  been  exagger- 
ated, the  situation  of  the  Church  was  not  one  to  invite  the  historian. 
Constantine  was  its  deliverer ;  in  a  few  years  it  passed  from  oppres- 
'  sion  to  power.  And  in  the  hour  of  its  triumph  Christian  scholar- 
ship was  to  find,  in  a  bishop  high  at  court,  a  historian  worthy  not  only 
of  the  great  deeds  of  the  saints  and  martyrs,  but  of  the  new  imperial 
position  of  the  Church. 

Eusebius  was  a  voluminous  writer,  "historian,  apologist,  topog- 
rapher, exegete,  critic,  preacher,  dogmatic  writer."  ^  But  his  fame 
as  a  historian  rests  upon  two  works,  the  Church  History  and  the 
Chronicle.  Both  were  epoch-making.  The  one  has  earned  for  the 
author  the  title  of  Father  of  Church  History;  the  other  set  for 
[Christendom  its  framework  in  the  history  of  the  world. 

The  Chronicle  was  written  first.^  It  is  composed  of  two  parts, 
the  Chronographia  and  the  Chronological  Canons.     The  first  of 

der  Kirchengeschichtsschreibung,  1892),  that  Eusebius  follows  the  hierarchical,  epis- 
copal thread  in  a  sort  of  constitutional  history  of  the  church. 

1  Cf.  C.  F.  G.  Heinrici,  op.  cit.,  p.  13. 

2  See  Eiiscbms  of  Ccesarca  by  J.  B.  Lightfoot  in  Smith  and  Wace's  Dictionary  of 
Christian  Biography.     A  briUiant  article. 

'  He  already  refers  to  it  in  the  opening  of  his  Historia  Ecclesiastica,  Bk.  I,  Chap. 
I,  also  in  the  Edogae  Propheticae,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I,  and  in  the  Praeparatio  Evangelica, 
Bk.  X,  Chap.  IX,  which  were  both  written  before  313.  As  the  Chronicle,  when 
it  reached  Jerome,  was  carried  down  to  325,  it  is  conjectured  that  there  may  have 
been  a  second  edition. 


CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY  305 

these  is  an  epitome  of  universal  history  in  the  form  of  excerpts  from 
the  sources,  arranged  nation  by  nation,  along  with  an  argument  for 
the  priority  of  Moses  and  the  Bible.  It  is  a  source-book  on  the 
epochs  of  history,  much  like  those  in  use  today  as  manuals  in  our 
colleges.  The  second  part  consists  of  chronological  tables  with 
marginal  comments.  The  various  systems  of  chronology,  Chaldaean^ 
Greek,  Roman,  etc.,  are  set  side  by  side  with  a  bibhcal  chronology 
which  carries  one  back  to  the  creation,  although  the  detailed  and 
positive  annals  begin  only  with  the  birth  of  Abraham.  The  Canons 
therefore  presents  in  a  single,  composite  form  the  annals  of  all 
antiquity  —  at  least  all  that  was  of  interest  to  Christendom.  It 
presented  them  in  simplest  mathematical  form.  Rows  of  figures 
marked  the  dates  down  the  centre  of  the  page ;  on  the  right  hand 
side  was  the  column  of  profane  history ;  on  the  left  hand  the  column 
of  sacred  history.^ 

The  fate  of  this  work  is  oi  peculiar  interest.  It  is  doubtful  if 
any  other  history  has  ever  exercised  an  influence  comparable  to  that 
which  it  has  had  upon  the  western  world ;  yet  not  a  single  copy  of 
the  original  text  has  survived ;  the  Latin  west  knew  only  the  second 
part,  and  that  in  the  hasty  translation  of  Jerome.  Modern  research 
has  unearthed  a  soHtary  Armenian  translation  of  the  work  as  a 
whole,  and  modern  scholars  have  compared  this  with  the  fragments 
preserved  by  Byzantine  chronographers  ^  until  finally,  in  the  open- 

1  In  the  present  text  some  profane  history  notes  are  on  the  left  side,  but  this  was 
due  to  the  fact  that  the  comments  on  profane  history  were  fuller  than  those  on  sacred 
history,  and  were  crowded  over  for  reasons  of  space. 

Eusebius  was  largely  indebted  for  his  plan  to  Castor,  whom  he  invokes  at  the 
beginning  and  end  of  the  lists  for  Sicyon,  Argos  and  Athens.  Cf.  H.  Gelzer,  Sextus 
Julius  Africanus  .  .  .  ,  Part  II,  pp.  63  sq. 

On  the  relations  between  Eusebius  and  Julius  Africanus  see  H.  Gelzer,  op.  cit.. 
Part  II,  pp.  23-107. 

2  Especially  Georgius  Syncellus.  These  chronographers  preserved  such  large 
extracts  that  Joseph  Scaliger  was  able  to  risk  a  reconstruction  of  the  text  from  them 
alone.  Scaliger's  first  edition  was  published  in  1606,  the  second  edition  in  1658.  T^q 
Armenian  version,  with  a  Latin  translation,  was  published  at  Venice  in  1818  by 
J.  B.  Aucher.  The  text  in  Migne,  that  by  Cardinal  Mai  (1833),  is  based  upon 
this;  but  the  classic  work  on  the  Chronicle  is  that  of  A.  Schoene,  Eiiscbi  Chronicorum 
Libri  Duo  (Vol.  I,  1875,  Vol.  II,  1866),  while  the  Armenian  text  has  recently 
been  published  with  parallel  German  translation,  by  J.  Karst  in  the  great  edition 
of  Eusebius'  works  now  appearing  in  the  series,  Die  griechischen  christlichen 
Schrifls teller  der  ersten  drei  Jahrhutiderte.  It  has  also  the  version  of  Jerome,  edited 
by  R.  Helm. 


3o6    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

ing  of  the  twentieth  century  the  work  is  again  accessible  —  if  only 
to  the  learned.  If,  however,  recovery  of  the  chronicle  is  a  work  of 
archaeological  philology,  like  the  recovery  of  an  ancient  ruin,  yet 
all  the  time  that  it  had  lain  buried  this  httle  book  of  dates  and 
comments  had  been  determining  the  historical  outlook  of  Europe.^ 
For  the  next  thousand  years  most  histories  were  chronicles,  and  they 
were  built  after  the  model  of  Jerome's  translation  of  Eusebius' 
Canons.  Every  mediaeval  monastery  that  boasted  of  enough  culture 
to  have  a  scriptorium  and  a  few  literate  monks,  was  connecting 
its  own  rather  fabulous  but  fairly  recent  antiquity  with  the  great 
antiquity  of  Rome  and  Judaea  through  the  tables  of  Eusebius' 
arithmetic. 

This  anonymous  immortahty  of  the  great  Chronicle  is  easily 
accounted  for.  It  was  not  a  work  of  hterature,  but  of  mathematics. 
Now  mathematics  is  as  genuine  art  as  is  Hterature,  art  of  the  most 
perfect  type ;  but  its  expression,  for  that  very  reason,  is  not  in  the 
variable  terms  of  individual  appreciations.  It  is  not  personal  but 
universal.  It  does  not  deal  with  qualities  but  with  numbers ;  or  at 
best  it  deals  with  qualities  merely  as  the  distinguishing  elements  in 
numbers.  The  structure  is  the  thing,  not  the  meaning  nor  character 
of  the  details.  And  the  structure  depends  upon  the  materials, 
^ence  there  is  Httle  that  is  Eusebian  about  Eusebius'  Chronicle, 
except  the  chronicle  itself.  It  has  no  earmarks  of  authorship  like 
the  style  of  a  Herodotus  or  a  Thucydides.  But  all  the  same  its 
\c,ontent  was  the  universal  possession  of  the  succeeding  centuries. 

There  is,  however,  a  simpler  reason  for  the  fate  of  Eusebius' 
^Chronicle.  It  has  a  forbidding  exterior.  It  had  even  too  much 
mathematics  and  too  much  history  for  the  Middle  Ages ;  they  were 
^satisfied  with  the  results  of  the  problem.  But  behind  this  forbid- 
ding exterior  the  modern  scholar  finds  a  synthesis  of  alluring  charm. 
Parallel  columns  of  all  known  eras  extend  up  and  down  the  pages ; 
eras  of  Abraham,  David,  Persia,  Egypt,  Greece,  Rome,  etc.  It  is 
interesting  to  see  this  tangle  of  columns  simpHfy  as  the  diverse 
nations  come  and  go ;  and  finally  all  sink  into  the  great  unity  of 
Rome.     At  last  the  modern  world  of  Eusebius'  own  time  was  left 

1  Joseph  Scaliger  refers  thus  to  the  influence  of  Eusebius.  "Qui  post  Eusebium 
scripserunt,  omne  scriptum  de  temporibus  aridum  esse  censuerunt,  quod  non  hujus 
fontibus  irrigatumesset."     (Quoted  in  J.  P.  Migne,  Patrologiae  Grcecae,  Vol.  XIX,  p.  14.) 


CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY  307 

but  four  columns,  the  years  of  Rome  (A.  U.  C.},  of  Olympiads,  of 
Roman  Consuls,  and  of  Christ.  The  rest  was  already  ancient  his- 
tory. As  one  follows  the  sweep  of  these  figures  and  watches  the"^ 
steady  hne  of  those  events  where  the  Providence  of  God  bore  down 
the  forces  of  the  unbehever,  one  reahzes  that  in  this  convincing 
statement  lay  the  strongest  of  all  defences  of  the  faith.  Here,  com- 
pressed into  a  few  pages,  lies  the  evidence  of  history  for  the  Chris- 
tian world-view.  Origen's  great  conception  that  pagan  history  was 
as  much  decreed  by  Jehovah  as  sacred  history  finds  in  the  Chronicle 
its  most  perfect  expression ;  the  facts  speak  for  themselves.^  No 
fickle  Fortuna  could  ever  have  arranged  with  such  dehberate  aim 
the  rise  and  fall  of  empires.  History  is  the  reservoir  not  of  argu- 
ment but  of  proof,  and  the  proof  is  mathematical.^  _J 

The  human  element  of  humor,  however,  comes  into  the  situation 
when  one  turns  back  to  the  opening  paragraph  and  learns  the  atti- 
tude of  Eusebius  himself.  "Now  at  the  very  beginning,  I  make 
this  declaration  before  all  the  world :  let  no  one  ever  arrogantly  con- 
tend that  a  sure  and  thorough  knowledge  of  chronology  is  attain- 
able. This  every  one  will  readily  believe  who  ponders  on  the  incon- 
trovertible words  of  the  Master  to  his  disciples :  '  It  is  not  for  you  to 
know  the  times  or  the  seasons,  which  the  Father  hath  put  in  his 
own  power'  [Acts  i  '].  For  it  seems  to  me  that  he,  as  Lord  God, 
uttered  that  decisive  word  with  reference  not  merely  to  the  day 
of  judgment,  but  with  reference  to  all  times,  to  the  end  that  he 
might  restrain  those  who  devote  themselves  too  boldly  to  such  vain 
investigations."  ' 

We  have  left  ourselves  little  space  for  the  work  by  which  Euse- 

1  This  view  of  universal  history  places  Eusebius  on  a  distinctly  higher  plane 
than  that  of  a  mere  apologist.  It  enabled  him  to  have  somewhat  of  the  Herodotean 
sweep  and  breadth.  Cf.  C.  F.  G.  Heinrici,  op.  cit.,  pp.  13  sqq.  Eusebius,  Ilisloria 
Ecclesiastica,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  VII. 

^  The  translation  of  the  Canons  by  Jerome,  while  apparently  superior  to  the 
Armenian  version,  bears  the  marks  of  careless  haste.  He  tells  us  himself  (Preface, 
11.  13  sqq.)  that  it  is  an  opus  tumuUuarium,  and  adds  that  he  dictated  it  most  hur- 
riedly to  a  scribe.  He  must  have  meant,  so  A.  Schoene  thinks  {Die  Wdtchromk  des 
Eusebius,  1900,  p.  77),  that  he  dictated  the  marginal  comments,  not  the  rows  of  figures. 
Likely  a  no  tar  ins  translated  the  figures  into  Latin,  and  Jerome  added  the  notes. 

A  great  deal  of  discussion  has  arisen  over  the  fact  that  in  the  Ecclesiaslical  History 
Eusebius  differs  decidedly  from  the  chronology  of  the  Chronicle. 

'  Eusebius,  Chronicorum  Liber  Primus,  Preface. 


<^ 


3o8    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

bius  is  chiefly  known,  the  Ecclesiastical  History.  So  far  as  students 
of  theology  and  church  history  are  concerned,  little  space  is  needed, 
for  the  work  itself  is  readily  accessible  and  that,  too,  in  an  English 
edition,  and  magnificently  translated.^  But  the  general  student  of 
history  seldom  reads  church  history  now,  and  the  achievement  of 
Eusebius  shares  the  common  fate.  Yet  it  is  a  great  achievement, 
and  a  genuine  surprise  awaits  the  reader  who  turns  to  it.  One 
might  expect  that  the  age  of  Constantine  would  produce  a  history 
of  the  obscure,  unstoried  institution  which  had  suddenly  risen  to 
the  splendor  of  an  imperial  church,  but  one  could  hardly  expect 
Ito  find  out  of  that  arena  of  fierce  theological  conflict  the  calm  and 
lofty  attitude  of  generous  reserve  and  the  sense  of  dominating 
scholarly  obligation  for  accuracy  which  characterize  the  first  church 
Lhistorian.  The  judgment  of  Gibbon,  that  the  Ecclesiastical  History 
was  grossly  unfair,^  is  itself  a  prejudiced  verdict.  To  be  sure  it 
slacks  the  purely  scientific  aim,  it  is  apologetic.  But  Eusebius  is  not 
to  be  blamed  for  that ;  the  wonder  is  that  he  preserved  so  just  a 
poise  and  so  exacting  a  standard  in  view  of  the  universal  demands 
of  his  time.  We  should  not  forget  that  the  apologetic  tone  of 
Christian  historiography  was  also  sanctioned  by  the  pagan  classics. 
Even  Polybius  had  demanded  that  history  be  regarded  as  a  thing 
of  use,  and  Cicero,  Sallust,  Livy  and  Tacitus  had  apphed  the  maxim 
generously.  Christian  historiography  should  not  bear  the  brunt 
of  our  dissatisfaction  with  what  was  the  attitude  of  nearly  all 
!_■  antiquity.^ 

1  The  Church  History  of  Eusebius  by  A.  C.  McGiffert,  in  the  Library  of  Nicene  and 
Post-Nicene  Fathers,  Second  Series,  Vol.  I,  pp.  81-403.  The  same  volume  contains 
a  translation  of  the  Life  of  Constantine  by  E.  C.  Richardson,  and  an  exhaustive  bib- 
liography. 

'  The  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  (J.  B.  Bury's  edition),  Vol.  II,  p.  135  : 
"Eusebius,  himself,  indirectly  confesses  that  he  has  related  whatever  might  redound 
to  the  glory,  and  that  he  has  suppressed  all  that  could  tend  to  the  disgrace  of  re- 
ligion;" adding  in  a  footnote,  "Such  is  the /afr  deduction  from  I:  82,  and  De  Mart. 
Palast.  c.  12." 

'  This  point  is  well  made  by  H.  O.  Taylor  in  The  Mediaeval  Mitid,  Vol.  I ,  pp.  78-81. 

At  the  same  time  Eusebius  advances  principles  of  historical  composition  against 
which  it  is  well  to  be  on  one's  guard,  as  for  instance  in  the  following  extract,  with 
reference  to  the  divisions  among  the  Churches  : 

"  But  it  is  not  our  place  to  describe  the  sad  misfortunes  which  finally  came  upon 
them,  as  we  do  not  think  it  proper,  moreover,  to  record  their  divisions  and  unnatural 
conduct  to  each  other  before  the  persecution.    Wherefore  we  have  decided  to  relate 


CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY  309 

The  task  of  Eusebius  was  a  difficult  one.  Only  those  who  have^l  1 
tried  themselves  to  extract  historical  data  from  theological  writings 
can  appreciate  how  difficult  it  was ;  but  even  they  have  an  advan- 
tage over  the  Father  of  Church  History.  For  now  the  principles 
of  scientific,  objective  criticism  of  sources  are  well  understood, 
and  the  historian  can  stand  apart  from  the  data  aware  that  his 
criticism  may  be  frankly  skeptical  without  injury  to  his  standards 
of  religion.  But  Eusebius  could  not  go  far  upon  that  path  without 
arousing  more  serious  doubts  as  to  his  general  canons  of  belief. 
His  history  was,  after  all,  intended  to  contribute  proof  of  the  truth 
of  the  central  doctrines  in  the  literature  it  used.  He  had  to  combine 
discriminating  judgment  with  the  ''will  to  believe."  There  is 
therefore  more  than  rhetoric,  though  it  is  not  lacking,  in  the  apology 
with  which  he  enters  upon  his  narrative :  Ji 

"  But  at  the  outset  I  must  crave  for  my  work  the  indulgence  of  the  wise,  for  ^ 
I  confess  that  it  is  beyond  my  power  to  produce  a  perfect  and  complete  history, 
and  since  I  am  the  first  to  enter  upon  the  subject,  I  am  attempting  to  trav- 
erse as  it  were  a  lonely  and  untrodden  path.  I  pray  that  I  may  have  God 
as  my  guide  and  the  power  of  the  Lord  as  my  aid,  since  I  am  unable  to  find 
even  the  bare  footsteps  of  those  who  have  traveled  the  way  before  me,  except 
in  brief  fragments,  in  which  some  in  one  way,  others  in  another,  have  trans- 
mitted to  us  particular  accounts  of  the  times  in  which  they  lived.  From  afar 
they  raise  their  voices  like  torches,  and  they  cry  out,  as  from  some  lofty  and 
conspicuous  watch-tower,  admonishing  us  where  to  walk  and  how  to  direct  the 
course  of  our  work  steadily  and  safely.  Having  gathered  therefore  from  the 
matters  mentioned  here  and  there  by  them  whatever  we  consider  important 
for  the  present  work,  and  having  plucked  like  flowers  from  a  meadow  the  ap- 
propriate passages  from  ancient  writers,  we  shall  endeavor  to  embody  the 
whole  in  an  historical  narrative,  content  if  we  preserve  the  memory  of  the 
successions  of  the  apostles  of  our  Saviour;  if  not  indeed  of  all,  yet  of  the  most 
renowned  of  them  in  those  churches  which  are  the  most  noted,  and  which  even 
to  the  present  time  are  held  in  honor. 

"  This  work  seems  to  me  of  especial  importance  because  I  know  of  no 
ecclesiastical  writer  who  has  devoted  himself  to  this  subject ;  and  I  hope  that 

nothing  concerning  them  except  the  things  in  which  we  can  vindicate  the  Divine 
judgment.  Hence  we  shall  not  mention  those  who  were  shaken  by  the  persecution, 
nor  those  who  in  everything  pertaining  to  salvation  were  shipwrecked,  and  by  their 
own  will  were  sunk  in  the  depths  of  the  flood.  But  we  shall  introduce  into  this  history 
in  general  only  those  events  which  may  be  useful  first  to  ourselves  and  afterwards  to 
posterity."  {The  Church  History  of  Eusebius  (A.  C.  McGiffert's  edition),  Bk.  VIII, 
Chap.  II.) 


3IO    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

it  will  appear  most  useful  to  those  who  are  fond  of  historical  research.  I  have 
already  given  an  epitome  of  these  things  in  the  Chronological  Canons  which 
I  have  composed,  but  notwithstanding  that,  I  have  undertaken  in  the  present 
work  to  write  as  full  an  account  of  them  as  I  am  able.  My  work  will  begin, 
as  I  have  said,  with  the  dispensation  of  the  Saviour  Christ  —  which  is  loftier 
and  greater  than  human  conception,  —  and  with  a  discussion  of  His  divinity  ; 
for  it  is  necessary,  inasmuch  as  we  derive  even  our  name  from  Christ,  for  one 
•who  proposes  to  write  a  history  of  the  Church  to  begin  with  the  very  origin  of 
Ichrist's  dispensation,  a  dispensation  more  divine  than  many  think."  ' 

P  In  spite  of  the  touch  of  rhetoric  in  such  passages  as  this,  the 
Ecclesiastical  History  does  not  hve  by  grace  of  its  style.  Eusebius 
had  no  refined  literary  taste  ;  he  wrote,  as  he  thought,  in  rambling 
and  desultory  fashion.  But  he  combined  with  vast  erudition  a 
"sterling  sense,"  and  a  "true  historical  instinct"  in  choosing  the 
selections  from  his  store  of  facts  and  documents.^  Conscious  of 
the  value  of  the  sources  themselves,  he  weaves  into  his  narrative 
large  blocks  of  the  originals,  and  in  this  way  has  preserved  many 
a  precious  text  which  would  otherwise  be  lost.  The  Ecclesiastical 
History  is  less  a  narrative  than  a  collection  of  documents,  for  which 
every  student  of  Christianity  is  devoutly  thankful,  and  more  thank- 
ful yet  that  the  author  was  so  keenly  conscious  of  his  responsibility. 
Wherever  his  references  can  be  verified  they  prove  correct,  which 
gives  a  presumption  of  accuracy  for  those  found  in  his  work  alone. 

Such  instances  of  scholarly  caution  occur  time  and  again  in  the 
Ecclesiastical  History,  in  some  cases  revealing  a  discriminating  use 
of  sources  in  the  effort  to  get  to  originals.  This  is  especially  the 
case  where  the  incident  narrated  may  seem  in  itself  improbable, 
'or  where  the  skeptic  is  likely  to  challenge  the  evidence.  For  ex- 
ample, he  narrates  a  story  of  Marcus  Aurelius  as  follows  : 

"It  is  reported  that  Marcus  Aurelius  Caesar,  brother  of  Antoninus,  being 
about  to  engage  in  battle  with  the  Germans  and  Sarmatians,  was  in  great 
trouble  on  account  of  his  army  suffering  from  thirst.  But  the  soldiers  of  the 
so-called  Melitene  legion,  through  the  faith  which  has  given  strength  from  that 
time  to  the  present,  when  they  were  drawn  up  before  the  enemy,  kneeled  on  the 
ground,  as  is  our  custom  in  prayer,  and  engaged  in  supplications  to  God.  This 
was  indeed  a  strange  sight  to  the  enemy,  but  it  is  reported  that  a  stranger 

>  The  Church  History  of  Eusebius  (A.  C.  McGiffert's  edition),  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I. 
2  See  the  fine  characterization  by  A.  C.  McGiffert,  in  the  Prolegomena  to  his 
edition  of  The  Church  History  of  Eusebius,  pp.  46  sqq. 


CHRONOLOGY  AND    CHURCH   HISTORY  311 

thing  immediately  followed.  The  lightning  drove  the  enemy  to  flight  and 
destruction,  but  a  shower  refreshed  the  army  of  those  who  had  called  on  God, 
all  of  whom  had  been  on  the  point  of  perishing  with  thirst. 

"  This  story  is  related  by  non-Christian  writers  who  have  been  pleased  to 
treat  the  times  referred  to,  and  it  has  also  been  recorded  by  our  own  people. 
By  those  historians  who  were  strangers  to  the  faith,  the  marvel  is  mentioned, 
but  it  is  not  acknowledged  as  an  answer  to  our  prayers.  But  by  our  own 
people,  as  friends  of  the  truth,  the  occurrence  is  related  in  a  simple  and  artless 
manner.  Among  these  is  Apolinarius,  who  says  that  from  that  time  the  legion 
through  whose  prayers  the  wonder  took  place  received  from  the  Emperor  a  title 
appropriate  to  the  event,  being  called  in  the  language  of  the  Romans  the 
Thundering  Legion.  TertuUian  is  a  trustworthy  witness  of  these  things.  In 
the  Apology  for  the  Faith,  which  he  addressed  to  the  Roman  Senate,  and  which 
we  have  already  mentioned,  he  confirms  the  history  with  greater  and  stronger 
proofs.  He  writes  that  there  are  still  extant  letters  of  the  most  intelligent 
Emperor  Marcus  in  which  he  testifies  that  his  army,  being  on  the  point  of 
perishing  from  thirst  in  Germany,  was  saved  by  the  prayers  of  the  Christians. 
And  he  says  also  that  this  emperor  threatened  death  to  those  who  brought 
accusations  against  us."  ^ 

This  scholarly  accuracy  was  combined  with  a  vast  learning.  1 
Eusebius  had  enjoyed  the  freedom  of  the  great  library  of  Pamphilus 
at  Antioch,  in  his  earher  days.  He  tells  us  that  he  gathered  ma- 
terials as  well  in  the  library  at  Jerusalem  founded  by  Bishop 
Alexander,^  and  Constantine  seems  to  have  opened  his  archives  to 
him.^  But  he  learned  not  less  from  the  busy  world  in  which  he 
lived.  He  was  no  recluse ;  he  hved  at  the  centre  of  things,  both 
politically  and  ecclesiastically.  His  genial  nature  blinded  him  to 
men's  faults,  and  his  judgments  on  contemporaries  —  particularly 
on  Constantine  —  are  of  little  value.'*  But  even  at  his  worst  he 
seldom  recorded  any  marvellous  event  without  the  Herodotean 
caution  of  throwing  the  responsibility  back  upon  the  original  nar- 
rative. There  is  no  better  example  of  this  than  the  account  in  thej 
Life  of  Constantine  of  the  emperor's  vision  of  the  cross.  It  was  an 
incident  all  too  likely  to  find  ready  that  credence  in  Christian  circles 
which  it  found  in  subsequent  ages.  But,  however  much  a  courtly 
panegyrist  Eusebius  could  be,  in  matters  of  fact  he  is  on  his  guard. 

1  The  Church  History  of  Eusebius  (A.  C.  McGiffert's  edition),  Bk.  V,  Chap.  V. 
^  Cf.  Hisloria  Ecclesiastica,  Bk.  VI,  Chap.  XX. 
3  Cf.  ibid.,  Bk.  V,  Chap.  XVIII. 

*  The  Life  of  Constantine  is  a  panegyric  rather  than  a  biography;  and  it  is 
unreliable  even  in  questions  of  fact. 


312     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

His  account  runs  soberly  enough :  ''And  while  he  was  thus  praying 
with  fervent  entreaty,  a  most  marvellous  sign  appeared  to  him  from 
heaven,  the  account  of  which  might  have  been  hard  to  believe  had 
it  been  related  by  any  other  person.  But  since  the  victorious  Em- 
peror himself  long  afterwards  declared  it  to  the  writer  of  this 
history,  when  he  was  honored  with  his  acquaintance  and  society,  and 
confirmed  his  statement  by  an  oath,  who  could  hesitate  to  accredit 
the  relation,  especially  since  the  testimony  of  after-time  has  estab- 
lished its  truth?"  1 

For  two  centuries  Christian  worship  had  lain  hidden  behind 
the  "Discipline  of  the  Secret."  The  uninitiated  knew  Httle  of 
what  was  held  or  done  by  the  adherents  of  this  intolerant  mystery, 
"after  the  doors  were  shut."  Constantine  brought  the  new  regime, 
when  persecution  and  secrecy  ceased.  Eusebius  had  Hved  through 
the  dark  days  of  Diocletian,  and  although  he  himself  had  escaped  — 
a  fact  sometimes  held  up  against  him  —  his  dearest  friends,  and 
above  all  his  great  teacher  Pamphilus,  had  been  martyred.  Free 
now  to  speak,  therefore,  he  turns  back  from  the  "peace  of  the 
church"  to  the  years  of  persecution  with  a  feeHng  for  martyrs  hke 
that  of  Homer  for  heroes,  of  the  Middle  Ages  for  wonder-working 
saints.^  He  depicts  their  sufferings,  however,  not  simply  as  the 
material  for  heroic  biography,  but  as  forming  the  subject  of  a 
glorious  page  of  history,  that  of  the  great  "peaceful  struggle"  by 
which  the  Kingdom  of  the  Messiah  was  to  take  its  place  among  and 
above  the  powers  of  this  world.  The  martyrs  of  Palestine  are  fight- 
ing the  Punic  wars  for  the  kingdom  of  Christ : 

"Other  writers  of  history  record  the  victories  of  war  and  trophies  won 
from  enemies,  the  skill  of  generals,  and  the  manly  bravery  of  soldiers,  defiled 
with  blood  and  with  innumerable  slaughters  for  the  sake  of  children  and  country 
and  other  possessions.  But  our  narrative  of  the  government  of  God  will  record 
in  ineffaceable  letters  the  most  peaceful  wars  waged  in  behalf  of  the  peace  of 
the  soul,  and  will  tell  of  men  doing  brave  deeds  for  truth  rather  than  country,  and 
for  piety  rather  than  dearest  friends.  It  will  hand  down  to  imperishable  re- 
membrance the  discipUne  and  the  much-tried  fortitude  of  the  athletes  of  religion, 
the  trophies  won  from  demons,  the  victories  over  invisible  enemies,  and  the 
crowns  placed  upon  all  their  heads." ' 

1  The  Life  oj  Constantine  (E.  C.  Richardson's  edition),  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XXVIII. 
*  Cf.  C.  F.  G.  Heinrici,  op.  cit.,  p.  3. 

'  The  Church  History  of  Eusebius  (A.  C.  McGiffert's  edition),  Bk.  V,  Introduction, 
Sects.  3,  4. 


CHRONOLOGY  AND   CHURCH  HISTORY  313 

-1 
It  was  reserved  for  a  greater  intellect  —  that  of  Augustine  —  to 

carry  this  conception  of  the  Church  as  the  reahzation  of  the  tem- 
poral Kingdom  of  Christ  to  its  final  form.  But  the  outlines  of  Au- 
gustine's City  of  God  are  already  visible  in  the  opening  chapters 
of  the  Ecclesiastical  History,  as  its  foundations  were  placed  by 
Eusebius'  master,  Origen.  The  Messiah  is  not  a  recent  Christ,  buF"' 
comes  to  us  from  the  beginning  of  the  world,  witnessed  to  by  Moses 
and  the  prophets.  And  when  "in  recent  times"  Jesus  came,  the 
new  nation  which  appeared  was  not  new  but  old,  the  Nation  of 
God's  own  Providence  —  Christian  and  universal.  The  paean  of  the 
victorious  Church  is  sounded  at  the  opening  of  its  first  history  ;J 
"A  nation  confessedly  not  small  and  not  dwelling  in  some  corner 
of  the  earth,  but  the  most  numerous  and  pious  of  all  nations,  in- 
destructible and  unconquerable,  because  it  always  receives  assist- 
ance from  God."  ^  This  is  the  historical  prologue  to  the  City  oj 
God. 

^  The  Church  History  of  Eusebius  (A.  C.  McGifiert's  edition),  Bk.  I,  Chap.  IV. 


POSTSCRIPT     ON     MEDIEVAL 
AND    MODERN    HISTORY 

CHAPTER  XXVII 
THE  INTERPRETATION  OF  HISTORY  i 

Two  great  questions  front  all  students  of  the  social  sciences : 
What  happened?  Why?  History  attempts  to  deal  mainly  with 
the  first.  It  gathers  the  scattered  traces  of  events  and  fills  the  ar- 
chives of  civilization  with  their  records.  Its  science  sifts  the  evi- 
dence and  prepares  the  story.  Its  art  recreates  the  image  of  what 
has  been,  and  "old,  forgotten,  far-off  things"  become  once  more  the 
heritage  of  the  present.  Though  no  magic  touch  can  wholly  restore 
the  dead  past,  history  satisfies  in  considerable  part  the  curiosity 
)  which  asks,  ''What  happened?"  But  "Why?"  What  forces  have 
been  at  work  to  move  the  latent  energies  of  nations,  to  set  going 
the  march  of  events?  What  makes  our  revolutions  or  our  tory 
reactions?  Why  did  Rome  fall,  Christianity  triumph,  feudalism 
arise,  the  Inquisition  flourish,  monarchy  become  absolute  and  of 
divine  right,  Spain  decline,  England  emerge,  democracy  awaken 
and  grow  potent?  Why  did  these  things  happen  when  or  where 
they  did?  Was  it  the  direct  intervention  of  an  overruling  Provi- 
dence, for  whose  purposes  the  largest  battalions  were  always  on  the 
m6ve?  Or  are  the  ways  past  finding  out?  Do  the  events  them- 
selves reveal  a  meaning  ? 

These  are  not  simply  questions  for  philosophers.  Children  in- 
sist upon  them  most.  He  is  a  lucky  story-teller  whose  Jack-the- 
Giant-Killer  or  Robin  Hood  is  not  cut  through,  time  and  again, 
by  the  unsatisfied  curiosity  as  to  why  the  beanstalk  grew  so  high, 
why  Jack  wanted  to  climb,  why  Robin  Hood  lived  under  a  green- 
wood tree,  etc.  Many  a  parental  Herodotus  has  been  wrecked  on 
just  such  grounds.     The  problem  for  the  philosopher  or  scientist 

^This  chapter  is  the  reprint  of  an  article  in  The  American  Historical  Review  for 
July,  19 13  (Vol.  XVIII,  No.  4).  It  was  first  given  as  a  lecture  in  the  University  of 
Illinois  in  that  year.  It  has  been  added  as  a  sort  of  supplementary  chapter  in  view  of 
the  impossibility  of  completing  the  survey  of  mediaeval  and  modern  historians  for  some 
years  to  come. 

314 


THE   INTERPRETATION   OF   HISTORY  315 

is  the  same  as  that  brought  forward  by  the  child.  The  drama  of 
history  unrolls  before  our  eyes  in  more  sober  form ;  our  Robin 
Hoods  become  Garibaldis,  our  Jack-the-Giant-Ealler  a  Napoleon, 
but  we  still  have  to  ask  how  fortune  and  genius  so  combined  to 
place  southern  Italy  in  the  hands  of  the  one,  Europe  at  the  feet  of 
the  other.  Not  only  is  the  problem  the  same,  but  we  answer  it  in 
the  same  way.  Here,  at  once,  we  have  a  clue  to  the  nature  of  in-  ' 
terpretation.  For  any  one  knows  that  you  answer  the  child's 
"Why?"  by  telling  another  story.  Each  story  is,  in  short,  an  ex- 
planation, and  each  explanation  a  story.  The  school-boy's  excusej 
for  being  late  is  that  he  couldn't  find  his  cap.  He  couldn't  find  his 
cap  because  he  was  playing  in  the  barn.  Each  incident  was  a  cause 
and  each  cause  an  incident  in  his  biography.  In  like  manner  most 
of  the  reasons  we  assign  for  our  acts  merely  state  an  event  or  a  con- 
dition of  affairs  which  is  in  itself  a  further  page  of  history.  At  last, 
however,  there  comes  a  point  where  the  philosopher  and  the  child 
part  company.  History  is  more  than  events.  It  is  the  manifes-  ■ 
tation  of  life,  and  behind  each  event  is  some  effort  of  mind  and  will,  >* 
while  within  each  circumstance  exists  some  power  to  stimulate  or 
obstruct.  Hence  psychology  and  economics  are  called  upon  to 
explain  the  events  themselves.  The  child  is  satisfied  if  you  accountj 
for  the  career  of  Napoleon  by  a  word  "genius,"  but  that  merely 
opens  the  problem  to  the  psychologist.  The  child  in  us  all  attributes 
the  overthrow  to  the  hollow  squares  of  Waterloo,  but  the  economist 
reminds  us  of  the  Continental  System  and  the  Industrial  Revolution 
which  made  Waterloo  possible. 

The  process  of  interpreting  history,  therefore,  involves  getting  '  ^ 
as  much  as  possible  out  of  history,  psychology  and  economics  — 
using  economics  in  the  widest  possible  sense  as  the  affective  material 
background  of  life.  This  does  not  get  to  final  causes,  to  be  sure. 
It  leaves  the  universe  still  a  riddle.  Theologians  and  metaphy- 
sicians are  the  only  ones  who  attempt  to  deal  with  final  causes  as 
with  final  ends.  Certainly  historians  cannot  follow  them  in  such 
speculations.  The  infinite  lies  outside  experience,  and  experience 
is  the  sphere  of  history.  When  we  talk  of  the  interpretation  of 
history,  therefore,  we  do  not  mean  its  setting  in  the  universe,  but  a 
knowledge  of  its  own  inner  relationships.  We  confine  ourselves  to 
humanity  and  the  theatre  of  its  activities.     But  within  this  realm 


3i6    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

of  mystery  man  exists,  acts  and  thinks  —  or  thinks  he  does  — 
which  is  all  the  same  for  historians ;  and  these  thoughts  and  deeds 
remain  mostly  un-understood,  even  by  the  actors  themselves.  Here 
is  mystery  enough,  mystery  which  is  not  in  itself  unknowable  but 
merely  unknown.  The  social  sciences  do  not  invade  the  field  of 
religion ;  they  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  ultimate ;  their  prob- 
lems are  those  of  the  City  of  Man,  not  of  the  City  of  God.  So  the 
interpretation  of  history  can  leave  theology  aside,  except  where 
theology  attempts  to  become  historical.  Then  it  must  face  the 
same  criticism  as  all  other  histories.  If  the  City  of  God  is  con- 
ceived of  as  a  creation  of  the  processes  of  civilization,  it  becomes  as 
much  a  theme  for  scientific  analysis  as  the  Roman  Empire  or  the 
Balkan  Confederacy.  If  theology  substitutes  itself  for  science  it 
must  expect  the  same  treatment  as  science.  But  our  search  for 
historic  "causes"  is  merely  a  search  for  other  things  of  the  same 
kind  —  natural  phenomena  of  some  sort  —  which  He  in  direct  and 
apparently  inevitable  connection.  We  interpret  history  by  know- 
ing more  of  it,  bringing  to  bear  our  psychology  and  every  other 
auxiliary  to  open  up  each  intricate  relationship  between  men,  situ- 

1  ations  and  events. 

This  is  our  first  great  principle.     What  do  we  mean  by  the 

^'meaning"  of  anything  but  more  knowledge  of  it?  In  physics  or 
chemistry  we  enlarge  our  ideas  of  phenomena  by  observing  how 
they  work,  what  are  their  afiinities,  how  they  combine  or  react. 
But  all  these  properties  are  merely  different  sides  of  the  same  thing, 
and  our  knowledge  of  it  is  the  sum  total  of  our  analysis.  Its  mean- 
ing has  changed,  as  our  knowledge  enlarges,  from  a  lump  of  dirt  to 
a  compound  of  elements.  No  one  asks  what  an  element  is,  be- 
cause no  one  can  tell  —  except  in  terms  of  other  elements.  The 
interpretation,  therefore,  of  physical  phenomena  is  a  description 
of  them  in  terms  of  their  own  properties.  The  same  thing  is  true 
of  history,  only  instead  of  description  we  have  narrative.     For  his- 

Itory  differs  from  the  natural  sciences  in  this  fundamental  fact, 
that  while  they  consider  phenomena  from  the  standpoint  of  Space, 
history  deals  with  them  from  the  standpoint  of  Time.  Its  data 
are  in  eternal  change,  moving  in  endless  succession.  Time  has  no 
static  relationships,  not  so  much  as  for  a  second.     One  moment 

l^erges  into  the  next,  and  another  has  begun  before  the  last  is  ended. 


THE  INTERPRETATION   OF   HISTORY  317 

The  old  Greeks  already  pointed  out  that  one  could  never  put  his 
foot  twice  into  the  same  waters  of  a  running  stream,  and  never  has 
philosophy  insisted  more  eloquently  upon  this  fluid  nature  of  Time 
than  in  the  writings  of  Professor  Bergson.  But  whatever  Time 
may  be  in  the  last  analysis  it  is  clear  that  whereas  physics  states 
the  meaning  of  the  phenomena  with  which  it  deals  in  descriptions, 
history  must  phrase  its  interpretations  in  narrative  —  the  narrative"^ 
which  runs  with  passing  time. 

Hence  history  and  its  interpretation  are  essentially  one,  if  we 
mean  by  history  all  that  has  happened,  including  mind  and  matter 
in  so  far  as  they  relate  to  action.  Any  other  kind  of  interpretation 
is  unscientific.  It  eludes  analysis  because  it  does  not  itself  analyze, 
and  hence  it  eludes  proof.  So  theological  dogma,  which  may  or 
may  not  be  true,  and  speculation  in  metaphysics  are  alike  outside 
our  problem.  Indeed,  when  we  come  down  to  it,  there  is  little  dif- 
ference between  "What  has  happened?"  and  "Why?"  The 
"Why?"  only  opens  up  another  "What?"  Take  for  example  aj 
problem  in  present  history:  "Why  has  the  price  of  living  gone 
up?"  The  same  question  might  be  asked  another  way:  "What 
has  happened  to  raise  prices  ?  "  The  change  in  the  form  of  sentence 
does  not  solve  anything,  for  who  knows  what  has  happened?  But 
it  puts  us  upon  a  more  definite  track  toward  our  solution.  We 
test  history  by  history. 

The  earliest  historical  narrative  is  the  myth.  It  is  at  the  same  ' 
time  an  explanation.  It  is  no  mere  product  of  imagination,  of  the 
play  of  art  with  the  wayward  fancies  of  childlike  men.  Myths, 
real  genuine  myths  —  not  Homeric  epics  composed  for  sophisti- 
cated, critical  audiences  —  are  statements  of  "facts"  to  the  be- 
Uever.  They  are  social  outputs,  built  up  out  of  experience  and 
fitted  to  new  experiences.  The  long  canoes  are  swept  to  sea  by 
the  northeast  hurricane,  and  year  by  year  in  the  winter  nights  at 
the  camp-fires  of  those  who  go  by  long  canoes  the  story  is  repeated, 
over  and  over  again,  until  the  sea  is  left  behind  or  a  new  race  brings 
triremes  with  machinery  in  the  inside.  So  long  as  the  old  society 
exists  under  the  old  conditions  the  myth  perpetuates  itself;  but 
it  also  gathers  into  it  the  reflex  of  the  changing  history.  It  there- 
fore embodies  the  belief  of  the  tribe,  and  this  gives  it  an  authority 
beyond  the  reach  of  any  primitive  higher  criticism.     Appealed  to  as 


3i8     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

the  "wisdom  of  our  fathers,"  as  the  universally  accepted  and  there- 
fore true  —  quod  semper  quod  ah  omnibus  —  it  becomes  a  sort  of  creed 
for  its  people.  More  than  a  creed,  it  is  as  unquestioned  as  the 
world  around  and  life  itself.  The  eagle  of  Prometheus  or  of  the 
Zuni  myths  is  as  much  a  part  of  the  world  to  Greeks  and  Zunis  as 
the  eagle  seen  yonder  on  the  desert-rim.  The  whole  force  of  society 
is  on  the  side  of  myth.  The  unbeliever  is  ostracized  or  put  to 
death.  What  would  have  happened  to  the  man  who  should  have 
dared  to  question  the  literal  narrative  of  Genesis  in  the  thirteenth 
century,  has  happened  in  some  form  in  every  society.  The  In- 
quisition, we  are  told,  was  merely  a  refinement  of  lynch  law.  In 
any  case  it  would  never  have  been  effective  without  popular  sup- 
port. The  heretics  of  all  ages  suffer  because  the  faith  they  chal- 
lenge is  the  treasured  possession  of  their  society,  a  heritage  in  which 
resides  the  mysterious  efficacy  of  immemorial  things. 

Now  it  is  a  strange  fact  that  most  of  our  behefs  begin  in  prior 
belief.  It  does  not  sound  logical,  but  it  remains  true  that  we  get 
to  beheving  a  thing  from  believing  it.  Belief  is  the  basic  element  in 
thought.  It  starts  with  consciousness  itself.  Once  started,  there 
develops  a  tendency  —  ''a  will"  —  to  keep  on.  Indeed  it  is  almost 
the  strongest  tendency  in  the  social  mind.  Only  long  scientific 
training  can  keep  an  individual  alert  with  doubt,  or,  in  other  words, 
keep  him  from  merging  his  own  behefs  in  those  of  his  fellows.  This 
is  the  reason  that  myth  has  so  long  played  so  momentous  a  role  in 
the  history  of  the  human  intelligence  —  by  far  the  largest  of  any 
|one  element  in  our  whole  history.  Science  was  born  but  yesterday. 
Myths  are  millenniums  old.  And  they  are  as  young  today  as  in 
the  glacial  period.  Heroes  and  victims  share  the  stage  of  the  drama 
of  history  with  those  uncanny  Powers  that  mock  at  effort  or  exalt 
the  weak,  and  trick  with  sudden  turns  the  stately  progress  of  so- 
ciety. Wherever  the  marvellous  event  is  explained  by  causes  more 
marvellous  still,  where  the  belief  is  heightened  by  basing  it  upon 
deeper  mysteries,  we  are  following  the  world-old  method  of  ex- 
plaining by  the  inexplicable. 

Myths  are  unsatisfactory  as  explanations  for  various  reasons, 
but  the  main  one  is  that  human  events  are  subordinated  to  the  super- 
natural in  which  they  are  set.  This  means  that  normal  events  of 
daily  life  are  generally  passed  unnoticed,  and  attention  is  con- 


THE   INTERPRETATION   OF   HISTORY  319 

centrated  upon  the  unusual  and  abnormal.  It  is  in  these  that  the 
divine  or  diabolic  intervenes.  They  are  preeminently  —  as  we 
still  say  of  railway  accidents  —  acts  of  God.  So  the  myth  neither'7 
tells  a  full  story,  with  all  the  human  data  involved,  nor  directs  to 
any  natural  sequence  of  events.  Sickness  and  consequent  catas^;/ 
trophe  are  not  attributed  to  malarial  mosquitoes  —  such  as  filled 
the  temples  of  .^sculapius  with  suppliants  and  depleted  Greece 
of  citizens.  All  misfortune  is  due  to  broken  taboos.  When  Roman 
armies  are  defeated  the  question  is,  "Who  has  sinned  and  how?" 
When  death  comes  to  the  Australian  bushman,  there  is  always 
black  magic  to  account  for  it.  And  pontiffs  and  medicine  men 
elaborate  the  mythology  which  explains  and  justifies  the  taboos. 

That  is  not  to  say  that  myths  are  the  creations  of  priests.  The  1 
creation  is  the  work  of  the  society  itself.  The  priest  merely  elabo- 
rates. The  initial  behef  resides  in  the  nerves  of  primitive  men,  they 
fear  of  the  uncanny,  the  vague  apprehension  which  still  chills  us 
in  the  presence  of  calamity.  Social  suggestion  is  responsible  for 
much  of  it  —  we  tremble  when  we  see  the  rigid  fear  on  the  faces  of 
those  beside  us.  When  some  one  whispers  in  the  dark,  "Isn't  it 
awful?"  "It"  suddenly  thrills  into  being,  like  a  ghost.  Voltaire 
was  wrong  to  attribute  the  origin  of  these  beliefs  of  superstition  to 
priestcraft.  The  priest  merely  took  hold  of  the  universal  beliefs 
of  his  people  and  gave  them  form  and  consistency,  as  the  minstrel 
wove  them  into  poetry.  The  scruple  about  entering  the  dark 
wooded  slopes  beyond  the  village  grain-fields  is  enough  to  people 
it,  for  most  of  us,  with  all  uncanny  things.  If  you  are  the  kind  of 
person  to  have  scruples  about  entering  a  wood  by  night,  you  are 
the  kind  to  appreciate  the  possibilities  of  lurking  danger  in  its 
shadows  and  moving  presences  in  its  thickets.  So  on  a  night,  when 
the  moon  is  high  and  the  wind  is  still,  you  may  hear  the  hounds  and 
the  wolf-packs  of  the  wild  hunters  —  of  Diana  and  Mars.  It  needs 
no  priestly  college  to  convince  us  of  that.  The  wood  and  the 
wolves  and  our  own  nerves  are  enough.  But  the  priestly  college 
develops  the  things  of  night  into  the  stuff  for  history ;  and  centuries 
after  the  howling  wolves  have  disappeared  from  the  marshes 
around  Rome  the  city  cherishes,  to  the  close  of  its  history,  the  myth 
of  its  founding. 

Men  first  tell  stories.     Then  they  think  about  them.     So  from 


320    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

mythology,  the  ancients  proceeded  to  philosophy.  Now  philosophy 
is  a  wide  word.  For  some  of  us  it  means  keen  criticism  of  funda- 
mental things.  For  others  it  is  a  befuddled  consideration  of  un- 
reahties.  But  whatever  it  may  be  now,  philosophy  came  into  the 
antique  world  as  science,  critical  analysis,  and  history  was  but 
another  name  for  it.  The  "inquiry"  of  those  Ionian  logographoi 
who  began  to  question  Homer,  in  the  sixth  century  before  Christ, 

^as  a  challenge  and  interpretation  of  myth.  So,  all  through  its 
history,  history  has  demanded  of  its  students  denial  rather  than 
acceptance,  skepticism  rather  than  belief,  in  order  that  the  story  of 
men  and  empires  be  more  than  a  myth.  But  the  tendency  to  beheve 
and  accept  is  so  strongly  impressed  upon  us  from  immemorial  social 
pressures  that  few  have  risen  to  the  height  of  independent  judgment 
which  was  the  Greek  ideal.  Criticism,  in  the  full  sense  of  the  word, 
is  an  interpretation.  To  reject  a  story  means  that  one  constructs 
another  in  its  place.     It  estabhshes  that  certain  things  did  not 

\  happen  because  certain  other  ones  did.  So  the  Greeks  corrected 
myths,  and  in  doing  this  made  history  more  rational.  Man  came 
into  the  story  more  and  the  gods  receded. 

One  may  distinguish  two  phases  of  philosophic  interpretation 
of  history,  that  in  which  the  philosophy  is  in  reality  a  theology  and 
that  in  which  it  is  natural  science.  In  the  first  phase  we  are  still 
close  to  myth.  Myth  places  the  cause  of  events  in  Mystery  of 
some  sort  —  deities,  demons,  the  Fates  or  Fortune.  Early  philoso- 
phy proceeds  upon  these  assumptions,  which  also  penetrate  most 
antique  histories.  Even  Polybius,  hard-headed,  much-experienced 
man  of  the  world,  cannot  quite  attribute  to  natural  causes  the  rise 
of  Rome.  Fortune,  that  wayward  goddess  of  Caesar,  had  some- 
thing to  do  with  it  —  how  much  it  would  be  hard  to  say.  Livy 
had  this  myth-philosophy  to  the  full ;  every  disaster  had  its  por- 
tent, every  triumph  its  omen.  This  was  the  practical  philosophy 
of  all  but  the  few  calm  thinkers  whose  skepticism  passed  into  the 
second  phase,  which  reached  all  the  way  from  an  open  question 
whether  or  not  the  gods  interfered  in  human  affairs  to  the  positive 
denial  of  their  influence.  The  great  sourcebook  for  such  inter- 
pretations of  history  is  Cicero's  On  the  Nature  of  the  Gods,  where 
one  may  find  in  the  guise  of  a  theological  discussion  a  resume  of 
the  various  pagan  philosophies  of  history.     For  the  philosophies 


THE  INTERPRETATION  OF  HISTORY  325 

history?  It  is  of  the  same  character  as  that  we  have  seen  in  the 
myth.  The  interpretation  is  outside  of  history  altogether.  Grant 
all  that  theology  claims,  that  Rome  fell  and  England  arose,  that 
America  was  discovered,  or  was  so  long  undiscovered,  because 
"God  wills  it."  That  does  not  enlarge  our  knowledge  of  the  pro- 
cess. It  satisfies  only  those  who  believe  in  absolutely  unquahfied 
Calvinism  —  and  they  are  becoming  few  and  far  between.  If  man 
is  a  free  agent,  even  to  a  limited  degree,  he  can  find  the  meaning 
of  his  history  in  the  history  itself  —  the  only  meaning  which  is  of 
any  value  as  a  guide  to  conduct  or  as  throwing  light  upon  his  actions. 
Intelligent  inquiry  has  free  scope  within  a  universe  of  ever-widening 
boundaries,  where  nature,  and  not  supernature,  presents  its  sober 
phenomena  for  patient  study. 

This  patient  study,  however,  had  not  yet  been  done  when  the 
eighteenth-century  deists  attacked  the  theological  scheme,  and 
their  philosophy  shares  to  some  extent  the  weakness  of  the  antique, 
in  its  ignorance  of  data.  Natural  law  took  the  place  of  an  inter- 
vening Providence ;  history  was  a  process  worked  out  by  the  forces 
of  nature  moving  uniformly,  restless  but  continuous,  unchecked, 
inevitable.  The  process  comprised  all  mankind ;  no  chosen  people, 
implying  injustice  to  those  not  chosen ;  no  miracles  disturbing  the 
regularity  of  nature.  This  was  an  advance  toward  future  under- 
standing because  it  concentrated  attention  upon  nature  and  the 
method  of  evolution,  yet  in  itself  it  cast  but  little  light  upon  the 
problem.  For  it  did  not  explain  details.  One  sees  its  failure  most 
where  it  risked  hypotheses  with  most  assurance,  in  its  treatment  of 
religion.  It  would  not  do  for  philosophers  to  admit  that  religion  — 
at  least  of  the  old,  historic  type  —  was  itself  one  of  the  laws  of 
nature,  implanted  in  humanity  from  the  beginning.  Consequently 
it  was  for  them  a  creation  of  priestcraft.  No  dismissal  of  its  claims 
could  be  more  emphatic.  Yet  the  old  theologies  have  since  proved 
that  they  have  at  least  as  many  natural  rights  in  society  as  the 
criticism  of  them,  and  now,  with  our  new  knowledge  of  primitive 
life,  dominated  by  religion  as  we  see  it  to  be,  we  cast  aside  the  ration- 
alist conception  as  a  distortion  of  history  almost  as  misleading  as 
those  of  the  mythology  it  tried  to  dispose  of. 

But  the  work  of  Voltaire  and  his  school,  in  disrupting  the  old 
authority  of  Church  and  Bible  —  bitterly  denounced  and  blackly 


326    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

maligned  as  it  has  been  —  is  now  recognized  by  all  thinking  minds, 
at  least  by  all  leaders  of  thought,  to  have  been  an  essential  service 
in  the  emancipation  of  the  human  intellect.  The  old  sense  of 
authority  could  never  afterwards,  as  before,  block  the  free  path  of 
inquiry;  and  the  Era  of  Enlightenment,  as  it  was  fondly  termed, 
did  enlighten  the  path  which  history  was  to  take  if  it  was  to  know 
itself.  The  anti-clerical  bias  of  Hume  and  Gibbon  is  perhaps  all 
the  casual  reader  perceives  in  them.  But  where  among  all  previous 
historians  does  one  find  the  attitude  so  genuinely  historical  ?  More- 
over, in  Hume  we  have  the  foundations  of  psychology,  and  a  criti- 
cism of  causality  which  was  of  the  first  importance.  It  would  be 
tempting  to  linger  over  these  pioneers  of  the  scientific  spirit,  who 
saw  but  could  not  realize  the  possibilities  of  naturalism.  Their 
own  achievement,  however,  was  so  faulty  in  just  this  matter  of 
interpretation,  that  it  was  not  difficult  for  the  reaction  of  the  early 
nineteenth  century  to  poke  holes  in  their  theories,  and  so  discredit  — 
for  the  time  being  —  their  entire  outlook. 

Before  Voltaire  had  learned  in  England  the  main  lines  of  his 
philosophy,  a  German-Scottish  boy  had  been  born  in  Konigsberg, 
in  Prussia,  who  was  destined  to  exercise  as  high  if  not  as  extended  a 
sovereignty  over  the  intellect  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Immanuel 
Kant,  however,  was  of  a  different  type.  He  fought  no  ringing 
fights  with  the  old  order.  He  simply  created  a  new  realm  in  meta- 
physics, where  one  could  take  refuge  and  have  the  world  as  his  own. 
The  idea  dominates.  Space  and  time,  the  a  priori  forms  of  all 
phenomena,  lie  within  us.  Mathematics  is  vindicated  because  the 
mind  can  really  master  relationships,  and  the  reason  emerges  from 
its  critique  to  grapple  with  the  final  problem  of  metaphysics.  This 
at  first  sight  has  little  to  do  with  interpreting  history,  but  it  proved 
to  have  a  great  deal  to  do  with  it.  The  dominance  of  ideas  became 
a  fundamental  doctrine  among  those  who  speculated  concerning 
causation  in  history,  and  metaphysics  all  but  replaced  theology  as 
an  interpreter. 

One  sees  this  already  in  the  work  of  the  historian's  historian  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  Leopold  von  Ranke.  To  him  each  age  and 
country  is  explicable  only  if  one  approaches  it  from  the  standpoint 
of  its  own  Zeitgeist.  But  the  spirit  of  a  time  is  more  than  the  tem- 
poral environment  in  which  events  are  set.     It  is  a  determining 


THE  INTERPRETATION  OF  HISTORY  327 

factor,  clothed  with  the  creative  potency  of  mind.  Ranke  did  not 
develop  this  philosophic  background  of  history,  he  accepted  it  and 
worked  from  rather  than  towards  it.  His  Zeitgeist  was  a  thing  for 
historians  to  portray,  not  to  speculate  about.  History  should  con- 
cern itself  with  the  preservation  of  phenomena  as  they  had  actually 
existed  in  their  own  time  and  place.  It  should  recover  the  lost  data 
of  the  past,  not  as  detached  specimens  such  as  the  antiquary  places 
in  his  museum,  but  transplanted  like  living  organisms  for  the  preser- 
vation of  the  life  as  well  as  of  the  organs.  Now,  where  else  should 
one  look  for  the  vital  forces  of  history  than  in  the  mind  of  the  actors  ? 
So  if  the  historic  imagination  can  restore  events,  not  simply  as  they 
seem  to  us  but  as  they  seemed  to  those  who  watched  them  taking 
place,  we  shall  understand  them  in  so  far  as  history  can  contribute 
to  their  understanding.  In  any  case  this  is  the  field  of  the  his- 
torian. If  he  injects  his  own  theories  into  the  operation  he  merely 
falsifies  what  he  has  already  got.  Let  the  past  stand  forth  once 
more,  interpreted  by  itself,  and  we  have  the  truth  —  incomplete, 
to  be  sure,  but  as  perfect  as  we  shall  ever  be  able  to  attain.  For, 
note  the  point,  in  that  past,  the  dominating  thing  was  the  Zeitgeist 
itself  —  a  thing  at  once  to  be  worked  out  and  working  out,  a  pro- 
gramme and  a  creative  force.  Why,  therefore,  should  one  turn 
aside  to  other  devices  to  explain  history,  since  it  explained  itself  if 
once  presented  in  its  own  light  ? 

Ranke  developed  no  further  the  implications  of  his  theory  than 
to  ensure  a  reproduction  of  a  living  past,  as  perfect  as  with  the 
sources  at  his  disposal  and  the  political  instincts  of  his  time  it  was 
possible  to  secure.  But  this  high  combination  of  science  and  art 
had  its  counterpart  in  the  philosophy  of  Hegel.  At  first  sight 
nothing  could  be  more  absurd  than  the  comparison  of  these  two 
men,  the  one  concrete,  definite,  searching  for  minute  details,  main- 
taining his  own  objectivity  by  insisting  upon  the  subjectivity  of 
the  materials  he  handles,  the  other  theoretic,  unhistorical,  creating 
worlds  from  his  inner  consciousness,  presenting  as  a  scheme  of 
historical  interpretation  a  programme  of  ideals,  unattained  and, 
for  all  we  know,  unattainable.  It  would  be  difficult  to  imagine  a 
philosophy  of  history  more  unhistorical  than  this  of  Hegel.  Yet 
he  but  emphasized  the  Idea  which  Ranke  implicitly  accepted. 

Hegel  was  a  sort  of  philosophic  Augustine,  tracing  through  his- 


328    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

tory  the  development  of  the  realm  of  the  spirit.  The  City  of  God 
is  still  the  central  theme,  but  the  crude  expectations  of  a  miraculous 
advent  are  replaced  by  the  conception  of  a  slow  realization  of  its 
spiritual  power,  rising  through  successive  stages  of  civilization. 
So  he  traces,  in  broad  philosophic  outlines,  the  history  of  this 
revelation  of  the  Spirit,  from  its  dawn  in  the  Orient,  through  its 
developing  childhood  in  Asia,  its  Egyptian  period  of  awakening, 
its  liberation  in  Greece,  its  maturity  in  the  Roman  balance  of  the 
individual  and  the  State,  until  finally  Christianity,  especially  in 
the  German  world,  carries  the  spirit  Hfe  to  its  highest  expression. 
In  this  process  the  Absolute  reveals  itself  —  that  Absolute  which 
had  mocked  the  deists  with  its  isolation  and  unconcern.  And  it 
reveals  itself  in  the  Idea  which  Kantian  critique  had  placed  in  the 
forefront  of  reality  and  endowed  with  the  creative  force  of  an  elan 
vital.  So  theology,  skepticism  and  metaphysics  combined  to  ex- 
plain the  world  and  its  history  —  as  the  working  out  of  an  ideal 
scheme. 

As  a  series  of  successive  ideals  the  Hegelian  scheme  may  offer 
some  suggestions  to  those  who  wish  to  characterize  the  complex 
phenomena  of  an  age  or  an  empire  in  a  single  phrase.  But  it  is  no 
statement  of  any  actual  process.  The  ideals  which  it  presents  re- 
main ideals,  not  realities.  History  written  to  fit  the  Hegelian  meta- 
physics would  be  almost  as  vigorous  a  distortion  as  that  which 
Orosius  wrote  to  fit  Augustinian  theology.  The  history  of  prac- 
tical Christianity,  for  instance,  is  a  vastly  different  thing  from  the 
history  of  its  ideals.  It  is  an  open  question  whether  the  ideal 
could  ever  be  deduced  from  the  practice,  and  not  less  questionable 
whether  we  are  any  nearer  realization  than  at  the  start.  There 
has  been  little  evidence  in  outward  signs  of  any  such  determinant 
change  in  the  nature  of  politics  or  in  the  stern  enforcement  of  eco- 
nomic laws  during  the  history  of  western  Europe.  We  find  our- 
selves repeating  in  many  ways  experiences  of  Rome  and  Greece  — 
pagan  experiences.  Society  is  only  partly  rehgious  and  only 
slightly  self-conscious.  How,  then,  can  it  be  merely  the  mani- 
festation of  a  religious  ideal?  Surely  other  forces  than  ideals  or 
ideas  must  be  at  work.  The  weakness  of  Hegel's  interpretation 
of  history  is  the  history.  He  interprets  it  without  knowing  what 
it  is.     His  interest  was  in  the  other  side  of  his  scheme,  the  Absolute 


THE   INTERPRETATION   OF   HISTORY  329 

which  was  revealing  itself  therein.  The  scheme,  indeed,  was  a 
sort  of  afterthought.  But  before  historians  directed  any  sufficient 
criticism  against  his  unhistoricity,  skepticism  in  philosophy  had 
already  attacked  his  Absolute.  It  was  the  materialistic  Feuer- 
bach,  with  his  thoroughgoing  avowal  that  man  is  the  creature  of 
his  appetite  and  not  of  his  mind  {Der  Mench  ist  was  er  isst),  who 
furnished  the  transition  to  a  new  and  absolutely  radical  line  of  his- 
torical interpretation  —  the  materialistic  and  the  economic. 

MateriaKsm  has  a  bad  name.  It  has  partly  earned  it,  partly  had 
it  thrust  upon  it.  But  whatever  one  may  think  of  its  cruder  dogmatic 
aspects,  the  fact  remains  that  interpretation  of  history  owes  at 
least  as  much  to  it  as  to  all  the  speculations  which  had  preceded  it. 
For  it  suppUed  one  half  the  data  —  the  material  half !  Neither 
theology  nor  metaphysics  had  really  ever  got  down  to  earth.  They 
had  proceeded  upon  the  theory  that  the  determination  of  history 
is  from  above  and  from  within  mankind,  and  had  been  so  absorbed 
with  working  out  their  scheme  from  these  premises  that  the  possibil- 
ity of  determination  from  around  did  not  occur  to  them,  until  the 
physical  and  biological  sciences  and  the  new  problems  of  economics 
pressed  it  upon  their  attention.  To  the  old  philosophies,  this  world 
was  at  best  a  theatre  for  divine  or  psychic  forces ;  it  contributed 
no  part  of  the  drama  but  the  setting.  Now  came  the  claim  that  the 
environment  itself  entered  into  the  play  and  that  it  even  determined 
the  character  of  the  production.  It  was  a  claim  based  upon  a  study 
of  the  details  from  a  new  standpoint,  that  of  the  commonplace,  of 
business,  and  of  the  affairs  of  daily  hfe.  The  farmer's  work  de- 
pends upon  his  soil,  the  miner's  upon  the  pumps  which  open  up  the 
lower  levels.  Cities  grow  where  the  forces  of  production  concen- 
trate, by  harbors  or  coal-fields.  A  study  of  plains,  river  valleys  or 
mountain  ranges  tends  to  show  that  societies  match  their  environ- 
ment ;  therefore  the  environment  moulds  them  to  itself.  So  the 
nature  of  the  struggle  for  existence,  out  of  which  emerges  intelli- 
gence, is  determined  by  the  material  conditions  under  which  it  is 
waged. 

This  is  innocent  enough.  One  might  have  expected  that  philos- 
ophers would  have  welcomed  the  emphasis  which  the  new  thinkers 
placed  upon  the  missing  half  of  their  speculations.  For  there  was 
no  getting  around  the  fact  that  the  influences  of  environment  upon 


330    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

society  had  been  largely  or  altogether  ignored  before  the  scien- 
tific era  forced  the  world  upon  our  view.  But  no.  The  dogmatic 
habits  had  got  too  firmly  fixed.  If  one  granted  that  the  material 
environment  might  determine  the  character  of  the  drama  of  history, 
why  should  it  not  determine  whether  there  should  be  any  drama 
at  all  or  not?  There  were  extremists  on  both  sides,  and  it  was 
battle  royal  —  Realism  and  Nominalism  over  again.  One  was  to 
be  either  a  Hegelian,  booted  and  spurred,  sworn,  cavalier-Hke,  to  the 
defence  of  the  divine  right  of  the  Idea,  or  a  regicide  materialist  with 
a  Calvinistic  creed  of  irrehgion !  The  total  result  was  that  their 
mutual  opinion  of  each  other  brought  both  into  ill  repute.  Philos- 
ophies of  history  became  at  least  as  discredited  as  the  materialism 
they  attacked. 

Now  the  materialistic  interpretation  of  history  does  not  neces- 
sarily imply  that  there  is  nothing  but  materialism  in  the  process,  any 
more  than  theology  implies  that  there  is  nothing  but  spirit.  It  will  be 
news  to  some  that  such  was  the  point  of  view  of  the  most  famous  ad- 
vocate of  the  materialistic  interpretation  of  history,  H.  T.  Buckle. 
His  History  of  Civilization  in  England  (1857-1861)  was  the  first  at- 
tempt to  work  out  the  influences  of  the  material  world  upon  the  for- 
mation of  societies.  Every  one  has  heard  of  how  he  developed, 
through  a  wealth  of  illustration,  the  supreme  importance  of  food,  soil 
and  the  general  aspect  of  nature.  But  few  apparently  have  actually 
read  what  he  says,  or  they  would  find  that  he  assigns  to  these  three 
factors  an  ever-lessening  function  as  civilization  advances,  that  he 
postulates  mind  as  much  as  matter,  and,  with  almost  Hegelian 
vision,  indicates  its  ultimate  control.  He  distinctly  states  that 
"the  advance  of  European  civilization  is  characterized  by  a  di- 
minishing influence  of  physical  laws  and  an  increasing  influence  of 
mental  laws,"  and  that  "the  measure  of  civiHzation  is  the  triumph 
of  the  mind  over  external  agents."  If  Buckle  had  presented  his 
scheme  poHtely,  right  side  up,  as  it  were,  it  could  hardly  have  had 
a  sermon  preached  at  it !  But  he  prefaced  it  with  his  opinion  of 
theologians  and  historians  —  and  few,  apparently,  have  ever  got 
beyond  the  preface.  It  was  not  encouraging  reading  for  historians 
—  a  class  of  men  who,  in  his  opinion,  are  so  marked  out  by  "in- 
dolence of  thought"  or  "natural  incapacity"  that  they  are  fit  for 
nothing  better  than  writing  monastic  annals.     There  was,  of  course, 


THE  INTERPRETATION  OF  HISTORY  331 

a  storm  of  aggrieved  protest.  But  now  that  the  controversy  has 
cleared  away,  we  can  see  that,  in  spite  of  his  too  confident  formu- 
lation of  his  laws,  the  work  of  Buckle  remains  as  that  of  a  worthy 
pioneer  in  a  great,  unworked  field  of  science. 

Ten  years  before  Buckle  published  his  History  of  Civilization, 
Karl  Marx  had  already  formulated  the  "economic  theory  of  his- 
tory." Accepting  with  reservations  Feuerbach's  materiahst  attack 
upon  Hegel,  Marx  was  led  to  the  conclusion  that  the  motive  causes 
of  history  are  to  be  found  in  the  conditions  of  material  existence. 
Already  in  1845  he  wrote,  of  the  young-Hegelians,  that  to  separate 
history  from  natural  science  and  industry  was  like  separating  the 
soul  from  the  body,  and  "finding  the  birthplace  of  history,  not  in 
the  gross  material  production  on  earth,  but  in  the  misty  cloud 
formation  of  heaven."  ^  In  his  Misere  de  la  philosophie  (1847)  he 
lays  down  the  principle  that  social  relationships  largely  depend 
upon  modes  of  production,  and  therefore  the  principles,  ideas, 
categories,  which  are  thus  evolved  are  no  more  eternal  than  the 
relations  they  express,  but  are  historical  and  transitory  products. 
From  these  grounds,  Marx  went  on  to  socialism,  which  bases  its 
militant  philosophy  upon  this  interpretation  of  history.  But  the 
truth  or  falseness  of  socialism  does  not  affect  the  theory  of  history. 
In  the  famous  manifesto  of  the  Communist  party  (1848)  the  theory 
was  appHed  to  show  how  the  Commercial  and  Industrial  Revo- 
lutions, with  the  attendant  growth  of  capital,  had  replaced  feudal 
by  modern  conditions.  This,  like  all  history  written  to  fit  a  theory, 
is  inadequate  history,  although  much  nearer  reahty  than  Hegel  ever 
got,  because  it  dealt  more  with  actualities.  But  we  are  not  con- 
cerned here  with  Marx's  own  history-writing  any  more  than  with 
his  socialism.  What  we  want  to  get  at  is  the  standpoint  for  in- 
terpretation. Marx  himself,  in  the  preface  to  the  first  edition  of 
Capital,  says  that  his  standpoint  is  one  "from  which  the  evolution 
of  the  economic  formation  of  society  is  viewed  as  a  process  of  natural 
history."  This  sounds  like  the  merest  commonplace.  Human 
history  is  thrown  in  line  with  that  of  the  rest  of  nature.  The  scope 
is  widened  to  include  every  factor,  and  the  greatest  one  is  that 
which  deals  with  the  maintenance  of  life  and  the  attainment  of 
comfort.  So  far  so  good.  But  Marx  had  not  been  a  pupil  of  Hegel 
1  K.  Marx,  Die  heilige  Familie  (1845),  p.  238. 


332     INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

for  nothing.  He,  too,  went  on  to  absolutes,  simply  turning  Hegel's 
upside  down.  With  him  "  the  ideal  is  nothing  else  than  the  material 
world  reflected  by  the  human  mind."  ^  The  world  is  the  thing, 
not  the  idea.  So  he  goes  on  to  make  man,  the  modifier  of  nature, 
with  growing  control  over  it,  but  a  function  of  it  —  a  tool  of  the 
tool,  just  when  he  has  mastered  it  by  new  inventions. 

But  strange  as  it  may  seem,  Marx's  scheme,  like  Buckle's,  cul- 
minates in  mind,  not  in  matter.  The  first  part  is  economic  purely. 
The  industrial  proletarians  —  ''the  workers,"  as  sociahsm  fondly 
terms  them  —  are,  like  capitalism,  the  product  of  economic  forces. 
The  factory  not  only  binds  the  shackles  upon  the  wage-slaves  of  to- 
day, it  even  fills  the  swarming  ergastiila  of  city  slums  by  the  stimu- 
lation of  child  labor.  So  the  process  continues  until  the  proletariat, 
as  a  last  result  of  its  economic  situation,  acquires  a  common  con- 
sciousness. Then  what  happens?  The  future  is  not  to  be  as  the 
past.  Consciousness  means  intelUgence,  and  as  soon  as  the  prole- 
tariat understands,  it  can  burst  shackles,  master  economics,  and  so 
control,  instead  of  blindly  obeying,  the  movement  of  its  creative 
energy.  Whether  sociahsm  would  achieve  the  object  of  its  faith 
and  hope  is  not  for  us  to  consider,  but  the  point  remains,  that  in 
the  ultimate  analysis,  even  the  economic  interpretation  of  history 
ends  uneconomically.  It  ends  in  directing  intelligence,  in  ideals  of 
justice,  of  social  and  moral  order. 

Where  are  we?  We  have  passed  in  review  the  mythological, 
theological,  philosophical,  materialistic  and  economic  interpre- 
tations of  history,  and  have  found  that  none  of  these,  stated  in 
its  extremest  form,  meets  the  situation.  Pure:  theology  or 
metaphysics  omits  or  distorts  the  history  it  is  supposed  to  explain ; 
history  is  not  its  proper  business.  Materialism  and  economics, 
while  more  promising  because  more  earthly,  cannot  be  pressed 
beyond  a  certain  point.  Life  itself  escapes  their  analysis.  The 
conclusion  is  this :  that  we  have  two  main  elements  in  our  problem 
which  must  be  brought  together  —  the  psychic  on  the  one  hand, 
the  material  on  the  other.  Not  until  psychology  and  the  natural 
and  economic  sciences  shall  have  been  turned  upon  the  problem, 
working  in  cooperation  as  allies,  not  as  rivals,  will  history  be  able 
to  give  an  intelligent  account  of  itself.     They  will  need  more  data 

*  Quoted  from  the  preface  to  the  second  edition  of  Capital. 


THE  INTERPRETATION  OF  HISTORY  333 

than  we  have  at  present.  The  only  economics  which  can  promise 
scientific  results  is  that  based  upon  the  statistical  method,  for,  in 
spite  of  Bergson,  brilliant  guesses  can  hardly  satisfy  unless  they 
are  verified.  The  natural  sciences  are  only  beginning  to  show  the 
intimate  relation  of  Kfe  to  its  environment,  and  psychology  has 
hardly  begun  the  study  of  the  group.  But  one  sees  already  a  grow- 
ing appreciation  of  common  interests,  a  desire  on  the  part  of  econ- 
omists to  know  the  nature  of  the  mechanism  of  the  universe  whose 
working  they  attempt  to  describe ;  an  inquiry  from  the  biologist 
as  to  the  validity  of  un-eugenic  social  reform. 

Now  the  interpretation  of  history  lies  here,  with  these  cooper- 
ative workers  upon  the  mystery  of  life  and  of  its  environment,  and 
their  interplay.  That  does  not  mean  that  history  is  to  be  explained 
from  the  outside.  More  economics  means  more  history  —  if  it  is 
good  economics.  Marx,  for  instance,  attempted  to  state  both 
facts  and  processes  of  industrial  history,  Malthus  of  population, 
Ricardo  of  wages,  etc.  Both  facts  and  processes  are  the  stuff  of 
history.  The  statement  of  a  process  may  be  glorified  into  a  "law," 
but  a  *'law"  merely  means  a  general  fact  of  history.  It  holds  good 
under  certain  conditions,  which  are  either  historical  or  purely 
imaginary,  and  it  is  only  in  the  latter  case  that  it  lies  outside  the 
field  of  history.  It  is  the  same  with  psychology  as  with  economics. 
It  suppHes  an  analysis  of  action,  and  action  is  history.  Expla- 
nation is  more  knowledge  of  the  same  thing.  All  inductive  study 
of  society  is  historical. 

The  interpretations  of  history  are  historical  in  another  sense. 
Looking  back  over  the  way  we  have  come,  from  Greek  philosophers 
to  modern  economists  and  psychologists,  one  can  see  in  every  case/ 
that  the  interpretation  was  but  the  reflex  of  the  local  environment, 
the  expression  of  the  dominant  interest  of  the  time.  History  be-j 
came  critical  in  that  meeting  place  of  East  and  West,  the  Ionian 
coast  of  Asia  Minor,  where  divergent  civilizations  were  opened  up 
for  contrast  with  each  new  arrival  from  the  south  and  west  and 
where  travellers  destroyed  credulity.  In  the  same  way,  as  we  havel 
traced  it,  the  isolated  landed  society  of  the  Middle  Ages,  with  its 
absence  of  business  and  its  simple  relationships,  could  rest  compla- 
cent with  an  Augustinian  world-view.  Nothing  else  was  demanding 
explanation.     When  business  produced  a  Florence  and  Florence  a  J 


\ 


334    INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  HISTORY  OF  HISTORY 

Machiavelli,  we  have  a  gleam  of  newer  things,  just  as  Voltaire  and 
Hume  mirror  the  influences  of  Galileo,  and  the  voyages  to  China. 
With  the  nineteenth  century  the  situation  becomes  more  compli- 
cated, and  yet  one  can  see  the  interpretation  of  history  merely  pro- 
jecting into  the  past  —  or  drawing  out  of  it  —  the  meaning  of  each 
present  major  interest.  Kant  and  Hegel  fit  into  the  era  of 
ideologues  and  nationahst  romanticists ;  and  their  implications  are 
developed  under  the  reaction  following  the  French  Revolution. 
Buckle  draws  his  inspiration  from  the  trend  of  science  which  pro- 
duced —  in  the  same  year  —  the  Origin  of  Species.  Marx  is  the 
interpreter  of  the  Industrial  Revolution.  ! 

f^  But  this  does  not  mean  that  interpretations  of  history  are 
nothing  more  than  the  injection  into  it  of  successive  prejudices. 
It  means  progressive  clarification.  Each  new  theory  that  forces 
itself  upon  the  attention  of  historians  brings  up  new  data  for  their 
consideration  and  so  widens  the  field  of  investigation.  The  greater 
knowledge  of  our  world  today  reveals  the  smallness  of  our  knowl- 
edge of  the  past,  and  from  every  side  scholars  are  hastening  to 
make  the  content  of  history  more  worthy  of  comparison  with  the 
content  of  science.  From  this  point  of  view,  therefore,  inter- 
pretation, instead  of  assuming  the  position  of  a  final  judge  of  con- 
duct or  an  absolute  law,  becomes  only  a  suggestive  stimulus  for 
further  research. 

We  have,  therefore,  an  historical  interpretation  of  interpre- 
tations themselves.  It  accepts  two  main  factors,  material  and 
psychical,  not  concerning  itself  about  the  ultimate  reality  of  either. 
It  is  not  its  business  to  consider  ultimate  realities,  though  it  may 
be  grateful  for  any  light  upon  the  subject.  Less  ambitious  than 
theological,  philosophical  or  even  economic  theories,  it  views  it- 
self as  part  of  the  very  process  which  it  attempts  to  understand. 
If  it  has  no  ecstatic  glimpses  of  finality,  it  shares  at  least  to  the  full 
the  exhilaration  of  the  scientific  quest.  It  risks  no  premature  fate 
in  the  delusive  security  of  an  inner  consciousness.     When  you  ask 

lit  ''Why?"  it  answers  ''What?" 


INDEX 


Abydos,  54,  n. 

Achjeans,  193. 

Acts,  Book  of,  307. 

Acusilaus,  124  sq. 

JEneid,  219  sqq. 

/Eschylus,  147,  166. 

/Etolians,  193. 

Against  Apion,  120,  287  n. 

Agricola,  Cn.  Julius,  258. 

Album,  227. 

Alexander,  188,  206. 

Alexander  Polyhistor,  76  n. 

Alexandria,  32  sq.,  45  sq.,  49,  64,  iii,  117,  131, 

20s,  207  n.,  209,  291. 
Allegory,  53,  n.,  54  n.,  115,  117  sq.,  288,  290 

sqq.,  298. 
Alphabet,  28,  32  sq.,  36,  124,  134,  137,  204. 
Ammianus  Marcellinus,  211  sq.,  275  sq. 
Amos,  Book  of,  91. 
Anabasis,  180. 
Andronicus  Livius,  218. 
Androtion,  188  n. 
Animism,  42. 
Annates  Maximi,  213,    226  n.,    227   sq.,  230, 

234- 

Annals,  39,  102,  106,  217,  220,  226,  229; 
Assyrian,  72,  loi ;  Egyptian,  51  sq.,  55  sq., 
SSsqq.;  Mediaeval,  9,  30  n.,  143 ;  Monastic, 
238;  Origin  of,  38;  Priestly,  45  ;  Profane, 
305  ;  Rome,  31,  39,  187  n.,  213,  226  sqq.,  238, 
252  sq.,  259,  264,  266,  276;  Royal,  45,  81, 
loi ;  Sacred,  305. 

Anthropology,  11,  15,  n.,  19,  21  n.,  26,11.,  40, 
86,  89  n.,  no  n.,  236. 

Antiochus,  125. 

Antipater,  L.  Coelius,  214,  234  sq. 

Antiochus  Epiphanes,  110,  120. 

Antonines,  208. 

Antonius,  Marcus,  212  sqq. 

Apion,  120,  n.,  123. 

Apocalypse,  Book  of,  284  n. 

Apocalypses,  105,  114,  116. 

Apocrypha,  112  n. 

Apollodorus,  50  n.,  207  n.,  238. 

Appian,  209,  275. 

Aquila,  112  n.,  291. 

Aratus,  193. 

Archaeology,  9,  12  sqq.,  26,  n.,  29  n.,  51  sq.,  66, 
71,  113,  128  sq.,  157  sq.,  170. 

Aristotle,  7,  33,  128,  136,  188  n.,  203,  214, 

332. 


Arrian,  209,  275. 

Aseliio,  P.  Sempronius,  229  n.,  234. 

Ashur-bani-pal,  31,  69,  74. 

Ashur-nasir-pal  III,  72  sq. 

Assyria,   26  n.,  44  sqq.,   66,   69,   72   sqq.,  80, 

100  sq.,  121  n.,  126,  129,  134,  230,  285. 
Astronomy,  40  sqq. 
Astruc,  J.,  113. 
Athens,   7,   49,    50   n.,  82,  135,  n.,  142   sqq., 

182   sqq.,  198,  214,  216  n.,  264,  305  n. 
Attalus,  50  n. 

Atthides,  125,  187  n.,  188  n. 
Atticus,  T.  Pomponius,  2,58,  n.,  239. 
Augustine,  St.,  105, 112,  n.,  220,  237,  239, 313, 

322  sqq.,  327  sq. ;  {Confessions  of),  105,  313  ; 

{Tke  City  of  God),  313,  323. 
Augustus.     {See  Caesar.) 

Babylon,  2,  12  n.,  16,  22  n.,  26,  n.,  29,  37  sq., 
41  sqq.,  66  sqq.,  81,  93,  95,  100,  102,  126,  129, 
134,  146  sq.,  154  sq.,  188,  225  n. 

Beaufort,  L.  de,  217  n. 

Behistun,  74  sq. 

Bergson,  H.,  317,  333. 

Berossos,  66  n.,  76  sqq.,  126. 

Beth-Omri,  100. 

Bible,  13,  n.,  32  n.,  54,  n.,  79  n.,  80  sqq.,  90  sqq., 
loi  sqq.,  113,  15s,  160,  291  sq.,  295,  298,  302, 
305.  325;  Christian,  112;  Hebrew,  102, 
III,  112,  n.;   Greek,  in  sq.,  121. 

Biography,  5  sq.,  104,  146,  180,  209,  259,  273 
sqq.,  279,  312,  315,  (Autobiography),  239. 

Bossier,  G.,  259,  268  n.,  274. 

Bossuet,  298,  324. 

Botsford,  G.  W.,  129  n. 

Breasted,  J.  H.,  9,  46,  60  sq. 

Buckle,  H.  T.,  330  sqq. 

Brutus,  M.  Junius,  192  n.,  238,  248. 

Bury,  J.  B.,  179  n. 

Cadmus,  124,  137,  n. 

Caesar,  C.  Julius,  49,  n.,  184,  227  n.,  238. 

Caesar  Octavianus,  C.  Julius,  (Augustus),  49, 
121  n.,  208,  219,  221,  n.,  230,  241,  248,  251, 
269. 

Calendar,  22  n.,  27,  38,  40  sqq.,  48,  56  n., 
141  sq..,  170  sq.,  229  sq;  Egyptian,  45  sqq.; 
Greek  farming,  49 ;  Lunar,  44,  47  sq. ;  Ro- 
man, 43,  48  sq.,  227. 

Callisthenes,  214. 

Callius,  125. 


335 


33^ 


INDEX 


Canon,  of  Old  Testament,  104  n.,  109;  of 
Ptolemy,  45  sq.;  of  Scriptures,  114. 

Carlyle,  T.,  i,  8,  24. 

Carthage,  192  sqq.,  232,  263. 

Cassius  Dio  Coccejanus.     {See  Dion  Cassius.) 

Cassius  Longinus,  C,  248. 

Castor  of  Rhodes,  207  n.,  301  n.,  305  n. 

Cato,  M.  Porcius,  213,  231  sqq.,  235  sq.,  243, 
244  n. 

Catulus,  Q.  Lutatius,  213. 

Celsus,  280,  294  sqq. 

Censorinus,  46. 

Christianity,  114,  279,  n.,  280,  282,  285,  287, 
289,  290  n.,  293  sq.,  296,  310,  321  sqq.,  328. 

Chronicle,  38  sq.,  59,  70  sqq.,  loi  sq.,  207  n., 
219,  238  n.,  301,  306. 

Chronicles,  Book  of,  83  n.,  84  n.,  loi  sq.,  104, 
no  n.. 

Chronology,  27,  40,  45,  47  sq.,  123,  141  sqq., 
170,  174,  185,  187  n.,  284  n.,  287  sq.,  298, 
301  sq.,  307  ;  Biblical,  98,  305  ;  Chaldaean, 
305;  Christian,  63,  207  n.,  298,  301,  n. ; 
Egyptian,  45,  n.  sqq.,  54,  56  n.,  76 ;  Greek, 
49  sq.,  187,  207  n.,  305  ■,   Roman,  244,  305. 

Cicero,  M.  Tullius,  24,  35,  180,  185,  186  n., 
200,  206,  211  sqq.,  215  sq.,  219,  221  n., 
22s  sqq.,  331  sqq. ;  (Brutus),  186  n.,  215  sqq., 
225,  232  sq. ;  {De  Oratore),  186  n.,  212  sqq. ; 
(On  the  Nature  of  the  Gods),  320. 

Cnossus,  12859.,  170. 

Codex,  34,  n.  sq.,  187. 

Commentarii  Pontificum,  227. 

Constantine,  303  sq.,  308,  311  sq. 

Constitution  of  Athens,  188  n. 

Corinth,  159,  189,  194,  n. 

Cornford,  F.  M.,  174  sq. 

Crassus,  L.  Licinius,  212. 

Cratippus,  186  n. 

Crete,  13  n.,  128,  134,  283. 

Croesus,  136,  147,  150,  159. 

Ctesius  of  Cnidus,  76. 

Cuneiform,  13,  66,  74  sq.,  loi. 

Cycle,  56  n. ;  Astronomical,  Luni-solar,  19- 
year,  48 ;  8-year,  48 ;  of  the  Olympiad, 
49  sq. ;   Sothic,  47. 

Daniel,  Book  of,  83  n.,  84  n.,  no,  n. 

Dante,  23,  145,  220  sq.,  324. 

Darius,  74  n.,  75  n.,  134,  147  sqq.,  153,  158  n., 

160. 
Darwin,  C,  4,  292;  (Origin  of  Species),  334. 
David,  79,  98  sqq.,  102,  105,  no,  284  n.,  sq., 

306. 
Decalogue,  79. 
Deists,  32s,  328. 

Delphi,  Oracle  of  Apollo,  83,  159. 
Demosthenes,  183. 
Descartes,  175,  212. 
Deuteronomist,  92  sq.,  96,  98. 
Deuteronomy,  Book  of,  83  n.,  92,  96  n.,  97  n. 
Diaspora,  117,  188,  290,  301. 


Diodorus  Siculus,  49  n.,  76  n.,  185  n.,  187  n., 

207  sqq. 
Dion  Cassius,  209,  211,  275. 
Dionysius  of  Halicarnassus,   142  n.,   195  n., 

208. 
Diptych,  30  n. 

Easter,  44. 

Ecclesiastes,  Book  of,  84  n.,  no  n. 

Ecclesiasticus,  Book  of.    (See  Proverbs.  .  .  .) 

Economics,  170,  173,  183,  315,  321,  323,  329, 
332  sqq. 

Egypt,  2,  9,  12  n.,  26  n.,  28  sqq.,  37,  42  sq., 
46  sq.,  49  sqq.,  79  sqq.,  90,  95,  117,  124,  126, 
134,  136,  139.  sq.,  146  sqq.,  153  sqq.,  204, 
207,  225  n.,  259,  262  n.,  285,  29s  n., 
306. 

Egyptologists,  46,  55,  n.,  56,  n.,  59,  63,  n. 

Elohist,  89  sqq. 

Ennius,  219,  229  n. 

Ephorus,  125,  128,  185  sqq.,  214,  239. 

Epic,  6,  10,  17,  23  sq.,  27,  69,  129,  133,  204, 
300 ;  Babylonian,  9,  69 ;  Christian,  9 ; 
Greek,  9;  Homeric,  69,  129,  183,  317; 
Minoan,  128;  Vergilian,  237. 

Epictetus,  209. 

Epigraphy,  29  n. 

Eratosthenes,  50,  n.,  206,  ,207  n. 

Eschatology,  284  n. 

Esther,  Book  of,  84  n.,  no  n.  sq. 

Eumenes  II,  34. 

Eusebius,  50  n.,  63,  76  n.,  sqq.,  130  n.,  142, 
207  n.,  248,  284  n.,  292,  297  n.,  300  n., 
302  sqq.;  (The  Chronicle),  76  n.,  130  n., 
304  sqq.;  (The  Ecclesiastical  History),  304, 
308  sqq. ;   (The  Life  of  Constantine),  311  sqq. 

Exodus,  Book  of,  83  n. 

Ezekiel,  Book  of,  83  n.,  92  n.,  104  n.,  108. 

Ezra,  Book  of,  83  n.  sq.,  102  sqq.,  no  n. 

Fabia,  P.,  269  n. 

Fabii,  219,  231,  257. 

Fabius  Pictor,  Q.,  196,  213,  219,  230  sq.,  23s. 

253- 
Fasti  Calendares,  227,  229. 
Fasti  Consulares,  227,  230. 
Fasti  Triumphales,  230,  n. 
Feuerbach,  L.  A.,  329,  331. 
Folk-lore,  23,  25  sqq.,  87  n.,  97  n.,  130. 
Fortunatus,  Venantius,  30  n. 
Fowler,  W.  W.,  217. 
Froissart,  94. 
Froude,  J.  A.,  8. 

Galileo,  324,  334. 

Gellius,  Aulus,  229  n.,  232,  275. 

Gemara,  115,  n. 

Genealogy,    26,    38  sq.,   80,   94,    n.,    103   n., 

137  sqq.,  142,  159,  300. 
Genesis,  Book  of,  68,  80,  83  n.,  86,  88,  94  n.,  95 

100,  119,  15s,  283  n.,  292,  302,  318. 


INDEX 


337 


Ceography,  40,  136  sq.,  139  sqq.,  143,  150, 
159,  181,  198,  206  sq.,  244,  252,  255. 

Georgius  Syncellus,  46  n.,  50  n.,  305  n. 

Germania,  258,  261,  266  n. 

Gibbon,  E.,  8,  276,  308,  326. 

Gilgamesh,  69,  156. 

Gnosticism,  293. 

Greece,  2,  6,  7  n.,  9,  25  n,  31  sq.,  34, 41,  43,  45, 
47  sqq.,  73  sq.,  75,  78,  82  sq.,  95,  117  sq., 
120  sqq.,  124  sqq.,  128  sqq.,  138  sqq.,  142  sq., 
14s,  n.,  sqq.,  153  sqq.,  160,  163  55.,  166  sq., 
17055?.,  175^9-,  ^79  sqq.,  191  599.,  19759., 
200  5g.,  202  59.,  205  555.,  212  sqq.,  221, 
231  59.,  264,  266,  278,  287,  291  sq.,  294, 
297,  n.,  300  sq.,  305  sq.,  318  59.,  322,  328, 

333- 
Gregory  of  Tours,  94,  261. 
Grimm,  J.  L.,  25  n. 
Grimm,  W.,  25  n. 

Hagiographa,  109,  115  n. 

Halicamassus,  7  n.,  142  n.,  sq.,  144  sqq.,  160, 
19s  n.,  208. 

Hammurabi,  66,  70,  n. 

Hecataeus  of  Miletus,  10,  47,  55  n.,  76  n., 
137  sqq.,  146,  154- 

Hegel,  G.  W.,  94,  327  sq.,  330  sqq.,  334. 

Hellanicus,  125,  142,  n.,  170,  187  n.,  213. 

Hellenica,  181  sq.,  186,  n. 

Hera,  List  of  priestesses  of,  49,  142. 

Heracleitus,  293. 

Herder,  J.  G.,  25  n. 

Herodotus,  2,  7  sqq.,  12,  32,  34,  37,  47,  49  n., 
62  sqq.,  76,  n.,  82,  88  sq.,  95,  117,  121, 
129,  133,  137,  n.,  139  sqq.,  144  sqq.,  149  sqq., 
160,  162  sqq.,  166  sqq.,  171  sq.,  176  sq.,  179, 
182,  191,  198  55.,  207  sq.,  214,  219,  248,  250 
sq.,  257,  266  n.,  276,  278,  285,  297,  302,  306 
sq.,  311,  314;   (Tke  History),  147. 

Hesiod,  43,  49,  82,  125,  131  sq.,  135,  137. 

Hexapla,  112  n. 

Hexateuch,  83  n.,  86,  96,  108. 

Hieroglyphs,  13  sq.,  28  sq.,  36,  38,  53,  56  sq., 
60  n. 

Historiography,  2,  156,  184,  286,  288,  300; 
Antique,  103,  123,  177,  203,  206,  250,  270, 
276;  Christian,  54  n.,  282,  288,  289,  292, 
296,  301,  308;  Greek,  123,  129  n.,  152  n., 
202  sq.,  210,  213;  Hebrew,  63,  86,  100,  103, 
106, 126;  Roman,  213,  218  n.,  229,  236,  239. 
History,  Ancient,  36,  113;  Antique,  166,  170, 
276,  289;  Anthropological,  16;  Argolic, 
125;  Babylonian,  170;  Biblical,  298;  as 
branch  of  literature,  i,  7,  52;  Christian, 
289  sq.,  296,  298,  302  sqq.;  Church,  290, 
302,  304;  of  Civilization,  134,  205;  Con- 
stitutional, 173;  Comparative,  287;  Con- 
temporary, 163,  205,  276;  Cultural,  173; 
Definition  of,  195  sq. ;  Divine,  58 ;  Eco- 
nomic, 59;  of  Egypt,  52,  62  sqq.,  170;  of 
Geography,  206;  Greek,  49  n.  sq.,  128,  133, 


159.  179.  182,  205  sq.,  253  n. ;  Hebrew,  Jew- 
ish, 81,  90,  97  n.,  loi  sq.,  106  sq.,  116,  120, 
123,  289  n.,  290  n.,  298;  Interpretation  of, 
100,  315  sqq. ;  (Allegorical),  287  ;  (Antique), 
322;  (Economic,  Materialistic),  173,  329 
sqq.;  (Historical),  334;  (Mythological), 
317  sqq.,  332;  (Philosophical),  320  sq., 
326  sqq.,  332;  (Theological),  322  sqq.,  332; 
of  Israel,  113,  292  ;  Latin,  276;  Legendary, 
24;  Meaning  of,  2  sqq.,  136;  Mediseval, 
36;  Modern,  163;  "Natural,"  4;  of  XIX 
Century,  183;  Oriental,  253  n.;  Origins, 
1059.;  Pagan,  296;  Persian,  179;  Philoso- 
phy of,  132,  197,  221 ;  of  Philosophy,  203; 
Pragmatic,  201 ;  Pre-Christian,  286 ;  Pre- 
historic, II,  12  sqq.;  Political,  133,  172, 
179  n. ;  Profane,  305  ;  Roman,  209,  217,  n., 
219,  225  sq.,  264,  276;  Sacred,  305  ;  Science 
of,  169;  Scientific,  260,  281;  Sicilian,  125; 
Universal,  179,  199,  238  sq.,  255,  299,  305. 

Homer,  2,  17  sq.,  23,  25,  n.,  33,  128  sqq.,  137, 
139,  14059.,  14s,  n.,  183,  218  sqq.,  284,  312, 
317,  320- 

Horace.     {See  Horatius  Flaccus,  Q.) 

Horatius  Flaccus,  Q.,  248. 

Hosea,  Book  of,  91,  92  n. 

Hume,  D.,  326,  334. 

Ihne,  W.,  218  n. 

Iliad,  82,  129  n.,  131,  135. 

Inscriptions,  13  sq.,  29,  37  sq.,  51  sq.,  157, 
226  n.,  231;  Assyrian,  72,  74  sq.,  100; 
Babylonian,  71  sq.;  Behistun  {see  Persian) ; 
Cuneiform,  66,  74,  loi ;  Egyptian,  31,  52, 
61  sq.;  (Palermo  Stone),  55  sqq.;  Greek, 
170,  226  n. ;    Persian  (Behistun),  74,  n., 

75,  n- 
Interpretation    of    History.       {See  History, 

Interpretation  of.) 
Ionia,  6  sq.,  41,  133,  135,  139,  144,  146  sqq., 

150,  278,  281. 
Isocrates,  182,  185  sqq.,  203,  214,  231,  234,  252. 
Israel,  81,  83,  n.,  90,  94,  99,  loi  sq.,  104  n.,  107, 

113.  285,  292,  298. 

Jahvist,  88  sqq. 

Jamnia,  no  n. 

Jeremiah,  283  n. ;  Book  of,  83  n.,  104. 

Jerome,  St.,  50  n.,   in  sq.,  221   n.,   279  n., 

291  sq.,  304  n.,  30s  sqq. 
Jews,  7,  n.,  44,  67,  79  sq.,  83,  95,  102  sqq.,  108, 

no  sq.,  115,  117  sq.,  120  sqq.,  157,  221,  279, 

282,  284,  285. 
Job,  Book  of,  84  n.,  no  n. 
Josephus,  63  sq.,  76  n.,  78,  83  n.,  103  n.,  no  n.. 

Ill,    114,     119    sqq.,    208,     287    n.,    302; 

{Against  Apion),   no  n.,   120,   123;    {The 

Antiquities  0/  the  Jews),  i2osqq. ;  {The  Wars 

of  the  Jews),  120  sq. 
Joshua,  Book  of,  83  n.,  86,  96  sqq.,  104,  no  n. 
Journalism,  28,  38,  136,  180  sq.,  183,  205,  264. 


338 


INDEX 


Judges,  Book  of,  83,  97  sqq.,  100,  104,  no  n. 

Judith,  Book  of,  in  sq. 

Julius  Africanus,  50  n.,  63,  284  n.,  300  n.,  sq., 

305  n. 
Julius  Caesar.     {See  Caesar.) 
Junianus  Justinus,  M.,  239. 
Justin  Martyr,  130  n. 
Justus  of  Tiberius,  301. 

Kant,  I.,  326,  328,  334. 
Karnak,  54,  n. 

Kings,  Book  of,  83,  86,  88,  93  n.,  98,  loi  sq., 
104,  no  n. 

Lamentations,  Book  of,  84  n.,  no  n. 
Law,  10855?.,  117-     (5ee  Pentateuch.) 
Legend,  2,  6,  17,  22  sqq.,  54,  86  sq.,  go,  93,  95, 

97,  n.,  100,  102,  n.,  106,  III,  129,  137,  163, 

217,  219,  225,  298,  301. 
Leviticus,  Book  of,  83  n. 
Libraries,   28  sq.,  ss  n-,  7i.   183,   187,   238; 

Alexandrian,  32  sq.,  50,  64,  205;   Assyrian, 

31,69,  74;   at  Jerusalem,  311;   Mediaeval, 

1 18  n. ;  of  Pamphilus,  303 ;  at  Pergamum,  34. 
Libri  Lintei,  230. 
Libri  Magistratuum,  230. 
Libri  Ponlificum,  2 -••7. 
Livius,  T.,  I  sq.,  184,  191,  205,  208  sq.,  211, 

215,  217,  219,  227,  229  n.,  231,  234,  n.,  239, 

243,  247  sqq.,  262  sq.,  269,  278,  284,  320; 

(^6  Urbe  Condita),  249,  251. 
Livy.     {See  Livius,  T.) 
Logographer,   136  sq.,  140  sqq.,  159,  163,  301 

sq.,  320. 
Logos,  109  n.,  136,  149,  153,  157,  250,  293. 
Lucretius  Carus,  T.,  23,  220  sqq.,  237,  321; 

{De  Rerum  Nature),  220  sq. 
LucuUus,  L.  Licinius,  240. 

Macan,  R.  W.,  149,  158  n. 

Macaulay,  T.  B.,  8,  154,  175,  186. 

Maccabees,  no,  115;   Book  of,  105,  112. 

Macer,  C.  Licinius,  234. 

Machiavelli,  255,  334. 

Malthus,  T.  R.,  333. 

Manetho,  62  sqq.,  76  n.,  126,  302. 

Marx,  K.,  331  sqq. 

Meton,  48. 

Meyer,  E.,  46,  167. 

Michelet,  J.,  8. 

Middle  Ages,  21,  33  n.,  35, 46  n.,  53  n.,  146  n., 

202,  211,  239,  247  n.,  253,  27s,  298,  312, 

333- 
Millennium,  283,  n.,  284  n. 
Minoan  Era,  Period,   13  n.,  128,  129  n.;  Life, 

129  n.;  Script,  129. 
Mishnah,  115. 

Mommsen,  T.,  218  n.,  262  n. 
Moses,  79,  83,  87  sq.,  90,  93  sq.,  96,  99  n.,  108, 

114,  115  n.,  118,  122,  130,  287,  293,  295, 

297  n.,  301,  305,  313. 


Myth,  10,  i6  sqq.,  54,  67,  69,  76  sqq.,  87  sq.„ 

91,  95,  no  n.,  130,  133,  135,  138,  163,  185,. 
217,  220  sqq.,  226  n.,  231,  300,  317  sqq. 

Nabonassar,  45,  76 ;  Era  of,  45,  n. 

Naevius,  Cn.,  219. 

Nehemiah,  Book  of,  83  n.,  84,  n.,  93  n.,  94  n., 

102  sqq.,  no  n. 
Nepos,  Cornelius,  231,  238,  n.,  248  n. 
New  Testament,  83  n.,  112  n.,  114  sq.,  289, 

292  sq. 
Nicholas  of  Damascus,  120,  n.,  121  n.,  208. 
Niebuhr,  B.  G.,  212,  217  n.,  247. 
Numa,  Calendar  of,  43. 

Octa'eteris,  48. 

Odyssey,  129  n.,  131,  218. 

Ogygos,  142. 

Old  Testament,  12,  21,  54  sq.,  80  sq.,  88  sq., 

92,  98,  104  sq.,  108,  no  sqq.,  114,  116,  121, 
130,  176,  188,  285,  287,  289  sq.,  294,  298, 
301. 

Olympiad,  50,  193,  307. 

Omri,  100. 

Orations,  in  History.     {See  Speeches.) 

Oratory,  176  sq.,  183  sqq.,  211,  213  sqq.,  231, 

238. 
Origen,  112,  118,  284  n.,  291  sqq.,  302  sqq., 

307,313- 
Orosius,  239,  328. 
Oxyrhynchus  Papyri,  186  n. 

Pais,  E.,  218  n. 

Paleography,  29  n.,  36. 

Palermo  Stone,  55  sqq. 

Pamphilus  of  Caesarea,  303  sq.,  311  sq. 

Panodorus,  45  n. 

Papyrus,  29,  31  sqq.,  81  n.,  170,  186,  204  sq. ; 

Harris,  53  n.;  Oxyrhynchus,  186  n. ;    Teb- 

tunis,  62  n. ;  Turin,  63  n. 
Parchment,  31,  33  sqq.,  204. 
Paul,  St.,  281  sq.,  286,  293,  322. 
Paulus,  L.  .^milius,  192. 
Pelham,  H.  F.,  251,  255. 
Pentateuch,  79,  83  n.,  86  sqq.,  96,  100  n.,  104 

106,  in  n.,  118,  n.,  155. 
Pergamum,  34,  50  n.,  204. 
Pericles,  8,  32,  133,  146,  165,  167,  257. 
Peter,  H.,  192  n. 
Pherecydes,  124,  213. 
Philistus,  125,  214,  232. 
Philo  Judaeus,  83  n.,  117  sqq.,  291  sq. 
Philocorus,  188  n. 

Philology,  25  n.,  113,  130,  236,  253,  306. 
Philosophy,  i,  2,  5,  7,  24,  loi  n.,  118,  120  n., 

123,   138  sq.,  179  sqq.,   188,   195  sqq.,  203, 

205,  207,  212,  215,  221,  264,  28s,  290  sqq., 

302,  315,  320  sqq.,  327,  329,  333. 
Photius,  185. 
Plato,  17,  82,  130  n.,  181,  183,  203  sq.,  264, 

29s,  297  n. 


INDEX 


339 


Plautus,  T.  Maccius,  230. 

Plinius  Secundus,  C,  236,  260  n. 

Plinius  CEcilius  Secundus,  C,  258  sq.,  274. 

Pliny .      {See  Plinius .) 

Plutarch,  207  sqq.,  240,  273,  27g. 

Poetry,  6,  23  sqq.,  no,  116,  132,  142,  i6g,  174, 

176  sq.,   179,   183,   204,   217  sq.,   220  sqq., 

225  sq.,  285. 
Polybius,   7,    121,    127,    136,    182,    185,    187, 

191  sqq.,  211,  216  sq.,  231,  235,  243  sq.,  250, 

253,  n.,  255,  278,  284  sq.,  303,  320  sq.,  323. 
Pontifex  Maximus,  30,  226,  228,  232,  234. 
Pompeius  Magnus,  Cn.,  p.  240. 
Pompey.     {See  Pompeius  Magnus,  Cn.) 
Porphyry,  141  n.,  297  n. 
Posidonius,  203  n.,  206  sq. 
Prehistory,  12  sqq.,  19. 
Prophecy,  83,  108  sqq.,  114  sq.,  117. 
Proverbs,  Book  of,  84,  n.,   no  n.,   in;    of 

Ben  Sira,  in  sq. 
Psalms,  Book  of,  79,  84,  n.,  88,  no  n.,  283  n., 

293- 
Ptolemy   (Ptolemaeus,  Claudius),   Canon  of, 

45,  46  n. 
Ptolemy  I,  32. 
Ptolemy  II,  32  n. 
Ptolemy  VI,  34. 
Punt,  22  n.,  62  n. 
Pyramid  Texts,  67. 

Quadrigarius,  Q.  Claudius,  234,  n. 
Quintilian.     {See  QuintiHanus,  M.  Fabius.) 
QuintiUanus,  M.  Fabius,  252. 

Ranke,  L.  von,  80,  175,  200,  326  sq. 

Rawlinson,  Sir  H.,  75. 

Regia,  30,  226  sqq.,  232. 

Rhetoricians,  177,  179,  182  sqq.,  203,  206  sqq., 
214  sqq.,  232,  244,  276. 

Rome,  2,  21,  25,  n.,  30  sq.,  41,  43,  48  sqq.,  82, 
120  sq.,  127,  13s,  15s,  164,  175.  179-  184, 
187  n.,  191  sqq.,  197  sq.,  200,  205  sq., 
208  sqq.,  211  sqq.,  217  sqq.,  225  sqq.,  236, 
.239  sqq.,  247  sqq.,  251  sqq.,  257,  259,  261, 
263  sqq.,  270,  27s  sq.,  278  sq.,  306  sq.,  316, 
323.  325.  328. 

Rosetta  Stone,  75. 

Ruth,  Book  of,  84  n.,  88  n.,  no  n. 

Saga,  129,  131  sq. 

Sakkara,  54,  n. 

Sallust.     {See  Sallustius  Crispus,  C.) 

Sallustius  Crispus,  C,  211,  215,  235,  239, 
241  sqq.,  248,  250,  308. 

Samuel,  Book  of,  83,  98  sq.,  100,  n.,  104,  1 10  n. 

Scaevola,  P.  Mucius,  213,  n.,  228,  234. 

Scaliger,  J.,  305  n.,  306  n. 

Scipio,  192,  211,  231. 

Scipio  Aemilianus  Africanus  Minor,  P.  Corne- 
lius, i8g,  192,  195,  198. 

Scipio  Africanus  Maior,  P.  Cornelius,  219,  234. 

Scriplores  Historiw  AuguslcB,  275. 


Septuagint,  112,  121,  igi. 

Servius  Maurus  Honoratus,  227  sqq. 

Severus,  Sulpicius,  298. 

Sisenna,  L.  Cornehus,  234,  245  n. 

Socrates,  175,  181  sq.,  204,  214. 

Speeches,  213,  216;  in  Caesar,  184;  in  Cato, 
231;  in  Ephorus,  185;  in  Hellenica  .  . ., 
186  n. ;  in  Herodotus,  159  sq.;  in  Livy, 
184,  252  sq.;  in  Thucydides,  167;  172, 
175  sq.,  184,  186  n. 

Strabo,  185  n.,  203  n.,  206  sq. 

Suetonius  Tranquillus,  C,  211,  273  sqq. 

Suidas,  146  n. 

Symbolism.     {See  Allegory.) 

Symmachus,  112  n.,  291. 

Syncellus.     {See  Georgius  Syncellus.) 

Taboo,  27,  37,  41,  43.  94,  98,  109. 

Tacitus,  C.  Cornelius,  2,  121  sq.,  191,  209, 
211  sq.,  215,  226  sq.,  229,  n.,  243,  257  sqq., 
273  sq.,  276,  278  sq.,  308;  {The  Annals), 
229,  259,  264,  276;  {Germania),  258;  {The 
Histories),  258,  264,  267,  276;  {The  Life 
of  Agricola),  258. 

Taine,  H.,  248. 

Talmud,  Babylonian,  114  sq.,  284  n. ;  Jeru- 
salem, 115. 

Tatian,  287  n. 

TertulUan,  311. 

Theagenes  of  Rhegium,  290. 

Theodotian,  112  n.,  291. 

Theopompus,  186  sqq.,  214,  233,  n.,  239. 

Thucydides,  i,  8,  23,  33,  49,  92,  125,  141  sq., 
157,  160,  162  sqq.,  184,  186,  n.,  191,  195  n., 
199,  212,  214  sq.,  233  sqq.,  240,  243  sq.,  257, 
264,  278,  284,  306,  321 ;  {History  of  thePelo- 
ponnesian  War),  166. 

Timaeus,  50,  125,  187,  n.,  198,  201,  206,  214. 

Tobit,  Book  of,  112. 

Treitschke,  H.  von,  186. 

Trogus,  Pompeius,  239. 

Valerius  Antias,  Q.,  234,  n. 

Varro,  M.  Terentius,  34,  236  sqq.,  253.  273, 

292,  306. 
Vergil.     {See  Vergilius  Maro,  P.) 
Vergihus  Maro,  P.,  54  n.,  211,  218  sgq.,  224, 

227,  229,  n.,  237,  248. 
Verrius  Flaccus,  M.,  229  n. 
Voltaire,  138,  319,  321,  324  sqq.,  334. 

Wells,  H.  G.,  238  sq. 
Wisdom,  Book  of,  in  sq. 
Wissowa,  G.,  217. 
Wolf,  F.  A.,  130  n. 

Writing,  14,  n..  Chap.  Ill,  102 ;  Socrates  on 
the  invention  of,  204. 

Xenophanes,  135,  138. 

Xenophon,  73,  163  n.,  179  sqq.,  182,  184, 
186  n.,  214  sq.;  {Anabasis),  180  sq.;  {Hel- 
lenica), i8i  sq.;  {Memorabilia),  181. 


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